The guitarist Nick McCabe said that most of the songs originated with Ashcroft singing and playing chords on an acoustic guitar, to which the rest of the band added other parts. He said: "It wasn't that much different from the processes that went into the earlier records. We all developed ideas on the spot and things happened additively ... They weren't products of Richard's mind. We dressed the acoustic guitar and the voice." He said he was unhappy that Ashcroft received sole songwriting credit on many tracks, because "I know what my part was in making that record. A lot of those tracks bare his name because we had a manager who encouraged that line of thinking at the time."
