The Used released In Love and Death in the United States on September 28, 2004, through Reprise Records. Their second studio album reunited vocalist Bert McCracken, guitarist Quinn Allman, bassist Jeph Howard and drummer Branden Steineckert with producer John Feldmann. The sessions expanded the band's use of piano and strings while preserving the heavier playing that had helped define its self-titled debut.
“All That I’ve Got” captured how personal that work could become. In a 2021 Revolver interview, McCracken traced the song to the death of his Chihuahua, David Bowie, during the recording period. He remembered struggling to work through the loss, then finding relief in the song. Over time, he came to hear it as a celebration of the life he had loved.
The album also became inseparable from the death of McCracken's former partner and their unborn child, although the writing did not all follow that tragedy. He told Bandwagon in 2018 that she died near the end of recording, when most of the songs were already written. He singled out “Hard to Say” as the song he was proudest of, describing it as the most honest he had been in his writing up to that point.
His musical vocabulary extended beyond the screams that had made him recognizable. McCracken had taken piano lessons from age five and sung in choirs, and those experiences became more prominent on the second record. He and Feldmann developed string arrangements, while songs such as “Yesterday’s Feelings” and “Lunacy Fringe” allowed more room for the band's ballad writing. Speaking to Campus Circle when the album appeared, McCracken described the music as “very happy, dancier and much brighter.” The arrangements gave the band ways to express more than one emotion within a record marked by loss.
There was room for a hardcore collaboration, too. McCracken had admired Coalesce vocalist Sean Ingram and asked him to sing on “Sound Effects and Overdramatics.” Ingram accepted and flew to Los Angeles to record. McCracken recalled the session to Revolver as an opportunity to work directly with a singer whose screaming had made a strong impression on him. Ingram's additional vocals became part of the finished track.
Even as The Used explored those possibilities, some material connected them to their earliest days. Howard told Alternative Press in its 2022 oral history of the debut that “Listening” had existed among the band's early songs before finding a home on In Love and Death. McCracken said the experience of making their first album had made the second easier to approach. They had already learned what it meant to work with a producer and turn their ideas into a finished record.
Feldmann's role also extended to encouraging McCracken to keep writing when he did not feel able to. In a December 2025 Alternative Press interview, the singer credited the producer's persistence with helping him put difficult experiences into words. Looking through his old handwriting returned him to specific places: Feldmann's studio floor with a CD player, or the car outside the apartment where he was living. Many songs, he recalled, had survived from their first drafts.
Those pages eventually became In Love and Death: The Lost Notebook. After the journal resurfaced online and was returned to McCracken, publisher Rare Bird reproduced its handwritten lyrics, poems, sketches and personal reflections, preserving the working pages behind the finished album.
