![]() ![]() The record's furthest sonic wandering point arrives in a minute-long brass interlude in "the book on how to change part II." Duffy leaves us with a proverb that doubles as a euphoric moment of clarity: "The book on how to change / Wasn't written in one day / The book on how to change / Never taught me anything. They were in a video conversation with the artist Curtis Santiago, and after surveying his. The Los Angeles-based musician, better known as Hand Habits, tells me about the illuminating moment on a recent call, their words taking on a meditative cadence. In "yr heart ," Duffy sings of a phone call to a distant lover with an almost Patsy Cline-like lilt: "And you are far but not that far / I can feel you push your fingers / Through the fabric of all my thoughts." Meg Duffy burst into tears when they chose the artwork for their new album. Duffy displays an adept ability to see their own duplicity, never resolving to pin blame on someone else: "Oh, but I was just a placeholder / A lesson to be learned / Oh, but now you're just a placeholder / For someone wasting time." The album's title track captures the musings of someone scorned but not dejected. These songs evoke waves of warm, pop-driven nostalgia, with equal doses of melancholy and optimism. Duffy's vocals find new confidence amid gentle guitar strumming and warbling pedal steel, blending into a haze of dreamlike Americana. While their earlier work was entirely self-produced, placeholder was recorded at Justin Vernon's Wisconsin studio. “We filmed this video in my aunt’s bar and club in upstate New York, linking the origin and lineage themes in the song with the visuals of changing identities and characters in a space I used to wander as a teen.”įun House is the “most ambitious Hand Habits album to date,” per a press release, inspired by Duffy starting therapy-after five years of consistent touring came screeching to a halt with the onset of the pandemic, Duffy “slammed on the brakes and everything psychologically that I’d been pushing down and ignoring for the past few years suddenly flew to the foreground”-as well as by working with Ashworth, who Duffy says “empowered me to take up a lot of different sonic spaces and challenged me to rethink these limitations I had about my own identity.” The resulting record follows the February release of Duffy’s three-track dirt EP, and their 2019 sophomore album placeholder, which Paste ranked among that year’s best.A gorgeous progression from Wildly Idle, placeholder captures Duffy's transfixing intimacy in elevated form. It was my goal to cloak some of the perils of mortality (lyrically) in a musical landscape that didn’t require the listener for a large amount of patience, to bring grief into the metaphorical club,” says Duffy in a statement. “What originally started as a minimally arranged acoustic ballad, ‘Aquamarine’ evolved into the story of certain events in life, what informs my identity, the silence in the questions left unanswered that become the shape of understanding who I am. ![]() Duffy changes clothes, as if in search of who they really are, and as the song’s final notes sound, they push open the front door and step into the daylight, free from their soul’s long night. The cinematic music video, in which Duffy sings and dances in an empty club, only amplifies the bittersweetness of “Aquamarine” further. The joyous instrumental and gut-wrenching lyrics each magnify the other’s power, overwhelming your emotions to the point that little details-“A payphone call / Two bloody knees”-land like atom bombs. It’s also unlike anything Hand Habits has ever released: A clattering dance beat and high/low synths create a stark frame around Duffy’s deeply personal vocals, which tell the tale of a drunken father, an estranged mother (“a little bit of her inside / everything I do”) seemingly lost to suicide, and a search for identity: “Who am I? / In the corners of your mind / In the drawers of your mind / Who am I?” Duffy sings as the song’s synths explode like fireworks, with acoustic guitars joining the cathartic chorus. “Aquamarine” is an absolute doozy, the kind of song that can break your heart with one hand and piece it back together with the other, fragment by fragment, beat by beat. ![]() V Haddad) for lead single “Aquamarine” is out now. The festival will run between May 27-29 at MASS MoCA. Duffy, who is an established touring and session guitarist. Japanese Breakfast, Sylvan Esso and more to play Wilcos 2022 Solid Sound festival. She has been putting her time in on the road and in the studio. 22 release via Saddle Creek, the 11-track LP is produced by Sasami Ashworth (aka SASAMI) and engineered by Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), and features vocals from Duffy’s friend and collaborator Mike Hadreas (Perfume Genius) on two tracks. Hand Habits is the indie rock project of musician Meg Duffy, which they started in 2012. Meg Duffy, aka Hand Habits, is a singer, songwriter and guitarist from Upstate New York. Los Angeles-based musician Meg Duffy has announced their third album as Hand Habits, Fun House.
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