Alex Lloyd was introduced to music courtesy of his father's beat-up, old guitar and the sessions that father and son spent working their way through a Beatles songbook (Lloyd preferred the group's latter, more studio-oriented stuff). His teenage years were spent playing at every opportunity: in the bedroom, at parties, and on the streets of the Sydney suburb of Balmain. Eventually, he was noticed as the lead singer of Sydney indie band Mother Hubbard, who was popular for their live performances and achieved some degree of success on record.

After one Mother Hubbard album, Lloyd wanted to take a major musical shift toward more of a technology-based sound. The members agreed to differ about the direction Lloyd wanted to take, leaving the singer to record the songs he had written for the next album as a solo, instead of a group, album. It also allowed him to throw himself much deeper into that technology than he might have if he'd still been recording with Mother Hubbard. The more he worked on the songs, the further he moved from the album he had initially imagined.