"Truth to Power" was written and produced by lead singer Ryan Tedder and T Bone Burnett. The lyrics are written from the perspective of Mother Nature speaking to her inhabitants as a call to action against climate change.[3] Gore described the song as capturing Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha.[3] Tedder described the background for the original composition of the song:[5]
To me, this needed to be reverential. And my default mechanism when writing is very often gospel, and some of the songs that we had done that were referenced when I got brought in are more gospel-leaning records. And when I watched the climactic parts of the film with Vice President Gore giving this speech at Stanford, where he becomes more and more emboldened as the speech goes on, by the end of it, I was like, oh, God, he’s just doing like an altar call right now. And I went to Oral Roberts University, so I’ve seen my fair share of altar calls.