Living with War is the twenty-ninth and -nominated by , released in 2006. The album's lyrics, titles, and conceptual style are highly critical of the policies of the ; the website defined it as "a musical critique of U.S. President George W. Bush and his conduct of the ". Written and recorded over the course of only nine days in March and April 2006, its lyrics are in line with the early 1960s albums of artists such as and , though it is set to what Young calls "metal folk protest music" courtesy of Young, bassist Rick Rosas, drummer and trumpet player Tommy Bray.

The Cromwell and Rosas rhythm section and "Volume Dealer" co-producer, , were also at the core of Young's 1989 album , which contained an angry criticism of . There are other links - Bray also performed on Freedom and Freedom's hit single "" also contained a quote of a President Bush: "".

Young began writing songs for Living With War in a hotel room while visiting his daughter at her . While retrieving from a early one morning, Young saw the front page of a issue documenting a surgery room on an airplane flying seriously wounded US soldiers from Iraq to .

He later told that the combination of the graphic picture and the headline (which focused not on any suffering and death depicted, but rather in medical breakthroughs made during the war) "for some reason, that was what did it to me. I went upstairs after that. I wrote this song, 'Families'; I started writing another song, 'Restless Consumer'; I started writing all these songs all at once; I had like four songs going at once." Young has said that following writing the songs, he quickly began "coming apart." He called his wife Pegi back to their room, and "I held on to her, and I was sobbing. I was sobbing so hard, that things were coming out of my face."

Sessions were recorded on 16 track analog tape and mixed to a half-inch analog two track master, then transferred to high-resolution digital for CD and DVD manufacturing. The vinyl pressing was on 200g vinyl.

On April 28, 2006, the album was given a pre-release premiere in its entirety on the Los Angeles radio station 95.5 KLOS by . The album was released onto the Internet on May 2, 2006 before entering into retail in May 2006. Young has expressed that his intent is that the work be considered as a whole, and the streaming audio internet release was the whole album, rather than individually selectable songs.

The rush release and political nature of the tracks also draws comparison to Young's 1970 song "".

The album was nominated for three in the categories of , and (both for "Lookin' for a Leader").

Commenting on the lack of artists writing songs critical of American politics at the time, Young said: "I was hoping some young person would come along and say this and sing some songs about it, but I didn't see anybody, so I'm doing it myself. I waited as long as I could."