Chris Baio home in London when he watched last fall’s presidential election results roll in. He stayed up into the early hours of Nov. 9, thinking he was about to lose his mind. The Vampire Weekend bassist, who has lived in the English capital for four years, was coming to terms with his native country’s new president and the wave of populism that struck his adopted home earlier that year.

“I was very, very distraught by it,” Baio says, speaking over the crowd noise at a bustling restaurant in New York’s Grand Central Station. “I thought if I drank my weight in whiskey, the result would change. I should be old enough to know that it doesn’t really work that way.”

Baio, who recently released his second solo album under his surname, Man of the World, took those boiling feelings and funneled them into his music, resulting in a collection of pointed lyrics crooned over electronic-leaning pop. The title of the album, in part, speaks to Baio’s feelings of being an American expatriate in a time of political unrest, something that also came through on his solo debut, 2015’s The Names.

“To be an American living in London in 2014 and to be an American living in London in 2016 are very different because of what was going on in the world,” Baio says, referencing both the rise of Donald Trump and Britain’s earlier vote to leave the European Union. Whether it’s in the directly anti-Trump song “Out of Tune,” the self-critical “Shame in My Name” or the slightly tongue-in-cheek “Sensitive Guy,” Man of the World addresses both the high-profile news headlines and the private strife of wrestling with your own reactions.

With plenty of tragedy and strangeness in 2016 to tap into for inspiration, Baio points to one specific moment that kicked it all off—the death of one of his heroes, David Bowie, whose birthplace of Brixton in South London was the location of the new album’s recording sessions. Baio talks of walking by the mural-turned-shrine of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane cover near the studio, which was a daily ritual that ended up influencing his new music.

“There was always someone taking photos, leaving flowers— you see the way in which music touches people in real life,” Baio remembers. “It’s a clear manifestation of how much people loved him as an artist, and that’s an incredibly inspiring thing when you’re walking to the studio with your coffee in the morning. There are references to him all over the record. The way I think of it, it’s my record of reckoning with what happened last year, and his passing was the beginning of that.”