In today’s America, “someone who feels threatened” could describe a lot of citizens — women, immigrants, people of color, members of the LGBTQ community, schoolchildren. “And we have people in the highest office legitimizing that,” Furman says. “It’s terrifying and it’s disappointing. It’s for sure a reason that I would suddenly be visited with this idea of writing songs about fleeing some kind of authoritarian regime with a stigmatized body. It showed up in my subconscious, but it was because it was in the air in 2016. It’s part of American life right now. Everybody has to deal with fear, and how vulnerable people are feeling. Somehow it’s a debate whether those fears are legitimate. I find myself asking on the album and in my own life, how frightened is it reasonable to be? Am I being overly paranoid or not paranoid enough?”