In the midst of coping with family members suffering from mental illness, Ana Egge was compelled to write the songs featured on Bad Blood. She stated, "It can be difficult to explain the realities of mental illness to people who don't have any firsthand experience. Loving someone whose reality ebbs and flows drastically from your own, you're constantly trying to imagine what they're thinking and feeling, but that's a crooked road. Sometimes there's no reason, there's no why." She continued, "Dealing with this can feel so isolating because no one wants to talk about it. These songs came out of the need to communicate. I drove it into my writing." On the title track "Bad Blood," Ana approached mental illness as a character unraveling and wreaking havoc on the world with the lyric “Bad Blood runnin' wild in the west, bad blood runnin' away." She wrote the song "Hole In Your Halo" after visiting a family member in jail and seeing how destructive the disease is and how it can turn people against themselves. In "Driving With No Hands," she tries to capture the potentially dangerous and erratic behavior that accompany the manic swings of the illness. Bad Blood conveys compassion and hope for redemption. With Earle's driving production and Egge's lilting melodies, the songs belie the dark undercurrent of the subject matter.

Ana Egge was born in Estevan, Saskatchewan and grew up in the town of Ambrose, North Dakota, population 50. At 12, the family relocated to Silver City, New Mexico, where her parents established a school by the name of Down To Earth. Her astrology teacher, Don Musser, was an accomplished luthier and the summer before she turned 17, Musser invited Ana to apprentice with the intention of helping her build her own guitar. She drove to his house once a week for seven months until the guitar was completed and it is the main guitar she continues to play today. After living in Austin, TX for five years in the 90s while working on her music, Ana returned to Silver City and began building her own house on her sister's land just outside of town. While she still maintains the home and visits often, she has called Brooklyn, NY her primary home since 2002. Ana Egge has toured and shared the stage with Lucinda Williams, Ralph Stanley, John Prine, Ron Sexsmith, Shawn Colvin, Joan Armatrading, Iris Dement, Richard Thompson, George Jones, and many more.