Although his public persona could be deemed to portray an image of despair, Smith has stated that his songs do not convey how he feels all the time: "At the time we wrote "Disintegration" [...] it's just about what I was doing really, how I felt. But I'm not like that all the time. That's the difficulty of writing songs that are a bit depressing. People think you're like that all the time, but I don't think that. I just usually write when I'm depressed."