In the podcast Song Exploder, Sumney tells the story about him going on a TED Talk cruise with a lot of very rich people and environmental scientists. They were very passionate about the environment, but were simultaneously dismissive of racial discrimination existing. Sumney wrote most the lyrics in his cabin on the cruise thinking about the distance between people from different social backgrounds. The song is about power, and it’s about the dynamic between two people from different social groups in a relationship. Sumney states:

you can’t call a disagreement between two people simply “a lovers' quarrel”, because that would imply that they’re equals, and we’re not