Joan Rivers television critic Jack Gould called Rivers "quite possibly the most intuitively funny woman alive". In 2017, "Rolling Stone" magazine ranked her sixth on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time, and in October the same year, she was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Joan Alexandra Molinsky was born on June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York, to Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman) and Meyer C. Molinsky. She had an elder sister named Barbara Waxler. Rivers spent her early life in Prospect Heights and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where she attended the progressive
This Is How the Wind Shifts also talks about settling down and giving up one's dreams. The lyrics of "Massachusetts" refer to an abusive relationship and the problems one faces with it. The band nearly thought about not recording the song due to its similarity to another Silverstein song. As a compromise, the group "changed it around slightly" according to Told. The tracks "This Is How" and "The Wind Shifts" were written and recorded at the same time. Told notes that they are a summary of the album and that they "symbolize how similar everyone is regardless of how different they seem externally." "A Better Place"