"An Empty Bliss Beyond This World follows the mind of a person who tries and struggles to remember even small parts of his life using broken sounds.[6] The record was based on a 2010 study about the ability of people with alzheimer's disease to remember music they listened to when they were younger, as well as where they were and how they felt when they listened to it.[8][9] The Caretaker project was inspired by the use of ballroom music in films such as Carnival Of Souls (1962), The Shining (1980), and the television series Pennies from Heaven (1978), which drew James Kirby to themes of memory loss that appear on An Empty Bliss Beyond This World: "Famously, people as they got older have started seeing dead people, people from the past, and that's their reality because the brain's misfiring. I'm very interested in these kinds of stories. Music's probably the last thing to go for a lot of people with advanced Alzheimer's. There are a lot of people who suffer from Alzheimer's who just hum the same songs over and over again."[10]