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. For this record, I had set out to write less as a way to process grief, dredge up trauma, or consider heartache, and more as a way to tap into something that was surprisingly more challenging to allow myself to feel into in the given moment—the decision I made to no longer shape shift when it came to the person I become in the face of love, explains Duffy.

Recorded in Los Angeles alongside co-producer Joseph Lorge, Blue Reminder finds Duffy once again 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 and Anna Butters of SML. Having spent a big part of the last decade on the road, both as a solo artist and as a 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 actually comes 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.

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