“In 2020, like everyone else, I was just a private person,” says Hval. “No artists were allowed to perform. I was reduced to ‘just me.’” As a result, Hval questioned what “just me” could mean. As an exercise, Hval wrote straight-forward stories about life, investigating the stripped-down “just me” concept. When Hval started writing stories that eventually became this record, the pandemic hit and she remembered specific times in her life that felt completely stripped of value; like when a celiac diagnosis halted the start of her music career. Hval elaborates: “This made me want to write simple stories. My problem was that I found that the music component in the writing process made the words stray from their path and even jump into the absurd. I think it is just bound to happen when there is music involved. After all, a song isn’t just words, it has a melody, and the reason we have melodies is to step into the dark and jump off cliffs.”