Bowie denied that any of the album's songs were written after September 2001, though he admitted that the songs deal with the general feeling of anxiety that he'd had in America for a number of years, adding "it's not unlikely that you're going to have a sense of angst in anything that's recorded in New York or by New Yorkers." He also said in a 2003 interview: "It was written as a deeply questioning album. Of course, it had one foot astride that awful event in September. So that was quite a traumatic album to finish. This one hints at that, but it's not really trying to resolve any trauma. 11 did affect me and my family very much. We live down here."