It was produced by Van Zandt's manager Kevin Eggers and Ron Frangipane, a pianist and string arranger who had studied under Igor Stravinsky and had previously worked with the Monkees, Dusty Springfield, John Lennon and The Rolling Stones.

"Whereas someone like Janis Ian would micromanage every eighth note, Townes was more like, sitting back in an old easy chair with holes in it, playing his guitar on the day before the session, saying, 'Well, what are we gonna do?'

Frangipane and engineer Brooks Arthur largely abandon the superfluous adornment that accompanied Van Zandt's first three albums, with the producer telling Kruth, "If I saw anything I could have done to get at least one crossover hit with Townes, I would have done it.

Although many listeners assume that "Nothin'" is about drug addiction, Van Zandt explained in a 1995 Dutch television interview that he wrote it immediately after reading The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis.

In October 1970, Van Zandt told WBAI DJ Ron Fass that he had written "Rake" in Wilmington, Delaware, after reading another novel by Kazantzakis, Saint Francis.

Townes went on to reveal that the lyric had been inspired by a couple of soldiers he met in Oklahoma, who spent their weekends fortified by a particular brand of cough syrup - an elixir that contained dextromethorphan hydrobromide - which they nicknamed "Delta Mama" after the "DM" that appeared on the bottle.

Biographer John Kruth singles out "Rake" for particular praise, writing in 2007, "The first note from Van Zandt's guitar fans out like a drop of blood dispersing in the water...The violins, which have betrayed him countless times in the past, are chilling, swelling into icy waves of sound.

"Nothin'" has been recorded by Dave Elias, Rowland S. Howard, Chris & Carla, Jeffery Foucault, Colter Wall, and Katie Jane Garside's band Ruby Throat on the 2009 album Out of a Black Cloud Came a Bird.

It features Van Zandt leaning in a doorway with a copy of Peter S. Beagle's classic fantasy novel The Last Unicorn sticking out of one of the pockets of his suede jacket and a kissing couple huddling in the corner.

On the back of the album a bespectacled Van Zandt stands alone on a dock holding a cigarette in one hand and a bottle in the other resembling, as biographer John Kruth put it in 2007, "a hip English professor on a summer bender."