The Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Taste for the album. Bill Rieflin and Chris Connelly instead attributed the album's sound to the band's interest in technology. For pre-production, Rieflin said he and Barker watched films for a month, sampling anything that caught their interest. Instead of writing music, they all improvised individually, rarely collaborating with each other. Connelly compared it to exquisite corpse, a Surrealist technique in which an artistic work is created collaboratively without any of the participants having knowledge of the others' contribution. Rieflin cited "So What" as the only track to feature two musicians in the studio at the same time. After playing with
This Is What the Truth Feels Like song she wrote with J.R. Rotem, Justin Tranter and Julia Michaels. She described it as a "work of art" for "express[ing] so clearly what [she] was [going through] at the time". They also worked on other songs, such as "Naughty", "Misery", which she considered a "really happy song," and "Make Me Like You", produced by Mattman & Robin, which, having been surprised by the result, she called "so good"! "This Is What the Truth Feels Like" focuses on several themes, including "moving on from a broken relationship" to "falling in love again". Her divorce from Gavin Rossdale served as the