[2][3][4][5] After the 2009 album Know Better Learn Faster, Thao Nguyen took a break from touring and recording, and volunteered with local outreach projects in her new home of San Francisco.

During these prison visits she met several women who were serving long sentences – one of them being Valerie Bolden who inspired the album's title track.

Nguyen considers this outreach work as a major influence on her music and stated that it had "emotionally shaped" much of We the Common.

Nguyen explained in an interview with Mother Jones, “We were on tour at the time so I could check out these burgeoning hubs of activity, and we came home and I thought, ‘If I lay still through this, shame if I sleep tonight.’" [8] The song “Kindness Be Conceived,” featuring Joanna Newsom, had been written a month before Nguyen had met Newsom.

[2] PopMatters described it as having a "big-tent sound", with Arnold Pan stating "the way We the Common gets across its open-minded, open-hearted attitude is a real triumph".