With the suggestion from ZE Records owner Michael Zilkha, Cale performed the album mostly improvised live at Skyline Studios in New York City.

"[1] Cale had previously attempted this method as the arranger of Nico's second studio album The Marble Index (1968).

The only track that features a full backing band is "Changes Made", with Blue Öyster Cult's Allen Lanier playing lead guitar on it.

[2] Also at the time, Cale was working with actor and playwright Sam Shepard on his opera The sad lament of Pecos Bill on the eve of killing his wife.

The song "Close Watch" is a re-recording of the version originally found on Cale's sixth solo studio album Helen of Troy (1975) but with a shortened title and was released as a single in both the UK and Europe in October 1982.

In 1993, Yellow Moon Records reissued the album on CD for the first time, featuring the previously unreleased bonus track "In the Library of Force".

On CD, the 58-second instrumental "Mama's Song", which originally featured as a standalone track on the vinyl LP release, was now incorporated into the running time of "(I Keep A) Close Watch".

A shortened and slightly misquoted version of these words ("It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world, to die in") is the epigraph of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' comic book limited series Watchmen (1986–1987), appearing in the final panel of the comic's twelfth issue (October 1987).

The epigraph is paraphrased by Adrian Veidt ("I envision a stronger, loving world") in the fifth episode of the Watchmen television series (2019).

"[3] In May 2010, Uncut listed Music for a New Society at number 10 in their list of great "lost" albums, with the review highlighting "Sanities" as the album's centerpiece: "...Over an aloof, majestic keyboard drone and fragmenting percussion, Cale's possessed narration evoked disaster on all fronts, ending with an ominous prediction of terrible things to come, the bleak promise of 'a stronger world, a stronger loving world... to die in.