Less than three days after a doctor predicted he would never play music again, Scott McCaughey began writing his next album. In November 2017, the Northwest underground stalwart suffered a stroke that nearly killed him and wiped his musical catalog from his memory — decades of albums and songs written and recorded with the Minus 5, Young Fresh Fellows, R.E.M., Baseball Project all disappeared. But instead of wallowing in misery, McCaughey channeled his omni-positive spirit and began to write down whatever incoherent thoughts crossed his mind. He turned those stream-of-consciousness notebook pages into his thirteenth full-length Minus 5 release, Stroke Manor.