Hersh has talked openly about her bouts with mental illness and its role in her musical process. When she was 16, she was struck by a car while riding her bicycle, suffering a double concussion that affected the way she heard sounds. She described it as hearing ambient sounds continuously and "...the sounds would alter their sonic vocabulary until I was hearing syllables, and drums. And then all these words would come.” She's stated that hearing "pieces of songs" in her mind compelled her to take the pieces apart and craft songs from them. She also claims that she doesn't remember writing her early songs—that "they wrote her."