Joseph started "People Make Me Nervous" holed up at home during the pandemic. But it wasn't exactly home... It was a one-bedroom apartment, shared with a girlfriend he'd known for less than a year at that time, in Chicago, a city he had spent a grand total of a few weeks in prior to the point that he essentially started living there.

Ozment was listening to the synth-pop outfit Nation of Language over the summer of 2020, which inspired a desire to change the music he was making. Something kind of upbeat and different than the down-tempo, folk-inspired material he had released previously, and the sound of synthesizers and electronica had started to really capture his interest in recent years.

“People Make Me Nervous” is a song about two things: the nervousness that hangs in the air in modern life — and especially which hung around in the air, on the grocery store, at work, and on the train during the earliest days of COVID — and the nervousness that comes up through comparing yourself to others. The neighborhood Joseph was staying in (and still live in today) was constantly at the top of listicles across the internet touting it as one of the coolest places in the world, and both the neighborhood and the city of Chicago were unlike anywhere he'd ever lived.

He started freaking out a little bit. "Everyone here is so cool !" "How am I ever going to fit in?" Everyone looks like they know what to wear, what to say, what to do… Like they just stepped out of a movie or a magazine. Pilsen was alive with something — it pulsated with an energy, it constantly breathed and moved. Joseph wanted to put all of these observations into the song.

PMMN gradually took on more life over the following few years as Ozment wrote extra verses and instrumental parts with my good friend Andrew Gold. A very rough demo was shared with my friend Steven Jackson, someone Joseph met (somehow) during the pandemic in Chicago and who now worked as a mixing engineer and producer at Berwyn Recording. In early 2023, almost three years after Jospeh first wrote the song, we brought it to life. It's his first release in over 3 years, and the first he's ever recorded in a professional studio setting.