[1] The album was recorded in Fellows' own home, largely on her own but with contributions from her husband John K. Samson, his Weakerthans bandmate Jason Tait, cellist Leanne Zacharias, violist Monica Guenter and multi-instrumentalist Barry Mirochnick.

[2] The album is framed by two songs, "Foreword" and "Afterword", that are written from the perspective of Klaus Burlakow, a Winnipeg city bureaucrat who was arrested for bank robbery in 2003, with Fellows stating that she was "fascinated by the way this guy could live a double life".

[2] Fellows explained that she had tried to write from a more fictionalized rather than autobiographical perspective on the album,[3] although she acknowledged that "Vertebrae" was written about visiting her dying grandfather in the hospital, and some lyrical details in the songs were drawn from her personal and professional relationships with Samson and Zacharias.

[5] Shawn Conner of the Vancouver Courier praised the album, writing that it is "filled with perfect miniatures as finely wrought and layered as a New Yorker short story, with an inviting first line and an eye for detail," and noted that the album "was made in Winnipeg, and the city's famous winters, its isolation and stillness set the tone for this sublime and affecting work".

[7] Silas Polkinghorne of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix named the album, alongside Rae Spoon's White Hearse Comes Rolling, Jason Collett's Idols of Exile and Constantines' Tournament of Hearts, as works that had been on his ballot for the 2006 Polaris Music Prize, with Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary being the only album on the shortlist that he had voted for.