Side two consists of three outtakes from the band's previous album, In Through the Out Door. 'Poor Tom' is from sessions for Led Zeppelin III, having been recorded at Olympic Studios in June 1970, and 'Walter's Walk' is a leftover from the sessions for Houses of the Holy.

Crowd tracks were muted on the multitrack mixdown on this recording as with 'We're Gonna Groove'. The recording was edited to remove the overall 'live' feel: the crowd noise as well as the beginning and ending of the song were deleted. ' I Can't Quit You Baby' is taken from the same concert as 'We're Gonna Groove' but was listed as a rehearsal in the original liner notes. This song was used to open a number of concerts on their early 1970 tours and was originally intended to be recorded for inclusion in Led Zeppelin II. It was later acknowledged to have come from a January 1970 concert at the Royal Albert Hall, with the guitar parts overdubbed and the original guitar part removed-this can be heard in the original Royal Albert Hall show on 9 January 1970. ' We're Gonna Groove' opens the album and, according to the album notes, was recorded at Morgan Studios in June 1969. basically there wasn't a lot of Zeppelin tracks that didn't go out. A lot of it was recorded around the time punk was really happening. As John Paul Jones recalled: 'They were good tracks. We thought, 'Well, if there's that much interest, then we may as well put the rest of our studio stuff out'. Guitarist Jimmy Page explained that part of the reasoning for the album's release related to the popularity of unofficial Led Zeppelin recordings which continued to be circulated by fans: ' Coda was released, basically, because there was so much bootleg stuff out. According to Martin Popoff, 'there's conjecture that Jimmy called 'We're Gonna Groove' a studio track and 'I Can't Quit You Baby' a rehearsal track because Swan Song owed Atlantic one more studio album specifically.' Atlantic counted the release as a studio album, as Swan Song had owed the label a final studio album from the band.

The album was a collection of eight tracks spanning the length of Zeppelin's twelve-year history. It cleared away nearly all of the leftover tracks from the various studio sessions of the 1960s and 1970s. The fifth Swan Song Records album for the band, Coda was released to honour contractual commitments to Atlantic Records and also to cover tax demands on previous monies earned.

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