Hand Habits

Hand Habits — Blue Reminder

For artists who have built a creative practice centered around vulnerability, what could possibly feel more exposing? For Meg Duffy, the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter known as Hand Habits, it turns out there are things even more daunting than excavating unhappiness or grappling with personal identity.

Recorded in Los Angeles alongside co-producer Joseph Lorge, Blue Reminder finds Duffy onceagain collaborating with an impressive coterie of musicians, including Alan Wyffels,Gregory Uhlmann (Duffy’s collaborator in Duffy x Uhlmann), Blake Mills, Tim Carr, Daniel Aged, and Joshua Johnson andAnna Butters of SML. Having spent a big part of the last decade on the road, both as a solo artist and asa touring member of Perfume Genius, Duffy’s affinity for playing live in a room with other musicians was the impetus for the record, which was largely tracked live. “I recommend playing music with people who are probably better than you are,” jokes Duffy. “All of these musicians are such incredible listeners. They all made me play so much closer to the heart. You know, I learn a lot every time I make a record – about where my comfort zones can be pushed and, maybe more importantly, about trusting the process, trusting other people.

The twelve songs on Blue Reminder walk a kind of emotional tightrope between hope and a kind of quiet anxiety, the record itself batting around the question of what one does when happiness actuallycomes knocking. At the core of these songs the genuine joy of love and self-actualization are always balanced against the potential fear of losing those things once you’ve found them. ‘I know the love we lose / Informs who we become,’ Duffy sings on “More Today,” a song whose sentiment seems to infuse the entire record. In tracks like “Way it Goes” and “Wheel of Change” past loves and emotional collapse clear the way for what comes next, while true romantic love — prickly and complicated and deeply illuminating — looms large.

This collection of songs largely eschew the more insular nature of earlier Hand Habits records, instead veering into the guitar-forward vibe of 90’s indie rock, with deftly assured songs that could exist in the same sonic universe with Aimee Mann or Neko Case, with the sort of left of center shifts in tone and lyrical observations that would not be out of place on a Cate Le Bon tune. Throughout the songs, guitars fuzz, drums move to the forefront, and the occasional horn or wurlitzer pass through. Everything feels elevated.

“I think it's so corny to write love songs,” admits Duffy, who is somewhat loath to think of BlueReminder as simply a love record. “I can’t deny that a lot of these are ostensibly love songs, but they are also love songs through my very specific kind of lens. It is about how falling in love does feel both terrifying and exciting, but this record is about commitment in a lot of ways. Committing to a person, to an idea, to being a more honest version of yourself.

Nowhere on the record is this fraught emotional state more apparent than on “Dead Rat” – a song that takes on the all-too-familiar renter experience of the dead rodent inaccessibly moldering away somewhere within a wall, and turns it into a gently-strummed metaphor for understanding our own limitations. The smell is overwhelming. It becomes a metaphor for everything gone wrong. Set against a backdrop of guitar and restrained piano, the song ends with a paean to a lover: “I know it’s because of your love I feel sorted out / When you came back home you opened all the windows / Put your arms around me / Told me it’s Ok to cry / ‘baby let it out’”

While tracks like “Bluebird of Happiness” and “Jasmine Blossoms” might be some of the ebullient songs that Duffy has ever written, there is a reason that “Blue Reminder” is not only the album’s title track, but also serves as the beating heart of the record. “Will you take me as I am? / Oscillating between / A woman, a child, and a broken man” sings Duffy, the music swelling around them. It is both the most beautiful song on the record and the most emotionally direct, the song closing with the lines, “I’m afraid of losing you / I’ll do anything to prove my love is true / I feel lighter now.”

“That's the one I'm the most proud of,” says Duffy. “It's my favorite song I've ever written, I think. I worked a really long time on it and was trying to do musical things that, in my previous attempts, I’d never felt quite satisfied with. It just felt like it encompassed everything about the record. It shows all of this vulnerability and it’s really just me showing up as the person who I am — which is a wreck most of the time — and what an incredible experience it has been to be accepted for the person I am.”

While Duffy doesn’t necessarily want the entire narrative around Blue Reminder to circle around romantic love, or to perhaps suggest that it’s only romantic love that allows us to be actualized or fulfilled, it does feel important to celebrate the joy of such things at a time when queer and trans people are largely being vilified. In a moment where there is so much fear and uncertainty, loudly articulating happiness andgiving voice to healthy relationships feels like a profound pushback against all the darkness.

Host or Publisher Lark Hall Albany