Songfacts®:

• The album name, along with its title song, was inspired by one of Grushecky's favorite books, John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Borrowing from the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and their two rivalrous sons Cain and Abel, the 1952 novel follows the tumultuous lives of the Trasks and the Hamiltons through generations of hardship to inevitable tragedy.
• Grushecky was still mulling over the Steinbeck book when he was reading about soldiers return home from Iraq, one of the proposed locations of the Garden of Eden. He explained in a Songfacts interview:
  
  "I thought, 'These guys are returning to the United States from somewhere east of Eden.' And that phrase just struck in my head."