Carpenter recorded The Things That We Are Made Of at Dave Cobb's Low Country Sound studio in Nashville, Tennessee; production was helmed by Cobb. She began writing the material for the album about four years prior, and described the writing process as similar to those of her previous works in an interview with Diane Rehm: "[W]henever I've started a record, I haven't really had, like, a topic or an agenda or anything to sort of stitch the songs together. They just kind of come out. And when I finished the writing for [The Things That We Are Made Of], I was able to sort of see it as one thing and it really was this sort of document of where I am in my life, what this age that I'm at is bringing to me, [and] what I have lost along the way." In another interview with HuffPost, Carpenter said that the album's songs "poses questions at every verse", further adding that "What I was trying to articulate is that duality, two sides of ourselves that want to be unanswerable but also want that deep connection and safety. How to reconcile those two things? The song "Something Tamed Something Wild" poses that question and those conversations run through the record."
