Despite the fiery spirit of the LP's hit singles, many of the album tracks have a subdued, reflective tone. Although written by Tony Joe White, the Billy Joe Shaver tribute "Billy" sounds like it could have just as easily been composed by Jennings, who recorded nearly an album's worth of Shaver's songs for his "Honky Tonk Heroes" album in 1973. The sentimental mood is also apparent on the LP's closing tracks: the heartfelt "Girl I Can Tell (You're Trying to Work it Out)" and the Shel Silverstein ballad "Whistlers and Jugglers." Even Waylon's cover of Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line" is reinvented as a ballad (Jennings and Cash, who shared an apartment together between marriages in the late 1960s, would score a hit duet with "There Ain't No Good Chain Gang" in 1978). However upsetting the turmoil in his personal life may have been, it seemed to spark Jennings' creativity; he wrote or had a hand in writing five of the ten songs on the LP, his biggest songwriting contribution to one of his own albums up to that point.