About two days before Marshall's nightmare, she had received a call from a friend who had challenged her to record something new. "He was like, 'Dude, what are you doing? You’re fucking up. You could be really doing something, and you’re just not putting anything in the universe, you’re just a loser,'" Marshall recalled, in a 2012 interview with Caroline McCloskey of "The Fader". "I was so pissed off." After the nightmare, Marshall went to New York City unsuccessfully seeking help, which included talking to priests. The afternoon that Marshall returned from New York, she received a call that her friend had died. Later that night, she heard that another friend of hers had died the same day. "So that’s when I woke up," Marshall recalled. "I was like, you know what? What am I doing?" With the cassette of the songs recorded the night of her episode still in her possession, Marshall decided to fax Turner and White, whose band the Dirty Three she had played shows with, and asked if they wanted to record. She asked her record label, Matador, for money to travel to Australia, and spent three months there "hanging out and having a great time" until being told by White that Turner would be leaving Australia in two days, at which point they entered the studio to record the album.