As Armatrading explains, she was immediately compelled to write the song after witnessing some alarmingly confrontational public behaviour by a young person: “He was like, ‘I’m going to kill everybody! I’m not moving! You can get the police! You can’t move me!’ All the lyrics just flowed, in one, and I knew it had to have an aggression, because that’s how he was. I did a version of it that was a little bit milder, but you could tell that wasn’t it.”
How Did This Happen And What Does It Now Mean was entirely written, produced, programmed and engineered by Joan Armatrading herself. Discussing the album’s title, she says, “You can apply it to just about anything. We are in such a weird place at the moment, and you do think, how did this happen? Some of the things we’re going through, and some of the things we can say and can’t say, and can and can’t do – how on earth do we get to this place, and what does it now mean? Where are we going to go now? It applies to all kinds of things. It’s like asking a question that you can’t answer.” (Uncut)
