Cold Hard Truth was released only three months after Jones was involved in a drunk driving incident when he crashed his sport utility vehicle near his home.

(In his memoir published three years earlier, Jones admitted that he sometimes had a glass of wine before dinner and that he still drank beer occasionally but insisted, "I don't squirm in my seat, fighting the urge for another drink" and speculated, "...perhaps I'm not a true alcoholic in the modern sense of the word.

The music video, which features photographs of the singer throughout his life, had a more gripping resonance in light of Jones's recent drunk driving incident with lines like, "Now I'm living and dying with the choices I've made."

Don McLeese of Amazon.com agrees: "Though George Jones suffered a near-fatal collision while recording this album, Cold Hard Truth has the vocal command of an artist with a new lease of life."

In a 2001 interview with Mark Binelli from Rolling Stone, Leonard Cohen asked, "Have you heard George Jones' last record Cold Hard Truth?