Of the ten tracks featured on it, seven of them she wrote solo while the remaining three were co-written with frequent collaborators Hillary Lindsey and Liz Rose, all of whom are collectively known as the Love Junkies.

[1] In an interview with WGBH's Boston Public Radio, McKenna said the following about how the album received its name from what would eventually be the title track: "It's funny, I've heard that term so many times over the years, [...] It struck me one night—that's what I do!

[4] Writing for Americana Highways, John Michael Antonio praised McKenna for "[using] her prodigious lyrical skills and keen storytelling ability to craft [the album's] ten songs" and noting "This Town Is a Woman" along with the album's "heartbreaking and tender" title song "The Balladeer", "Good Fight", "When You're My Age", and "Till You're Grown" as highlights.

He further highlighted songs such as "Stuck in High School" and "Til You're Grown", both of which he likened to the material of the Indigo Girls and Brandi Carlile respectively.

While highlighting "the unassumingly twisty 'This Town Is a Woman' and the bigamously two-timing 'Two Birds'" for utilizing her past best work's "modest metaphorical complexity", he argued that McKenna often succeeds simply "by returning to familiar themes like her mother's death and marriage's set-tos", leaving listeners convinced that "the corny title of 'When You're My Age' deserves the utopian wish it sets up: 'I hope the world is kinder than it seems to be right now.