An Interview With Meg Duffy of Hand Habits
“Being in other people’s bands and making instrumental music helps me have a well-rounded relationship with creativity without going crazy.”
I’ve long believed that Meg Duffy, who writes songs under the names Hand Habits, is a treasure.
I first met Meg in 2013 when they played a stacked show I helped book: Megabog, Hand Habits, Turnip King, Punishment, Mannequin Pussy. By 2016, we’d both leveled up: I wrote about music professionally and Meg played music professionally. Those worlds collided at Pitchfork Fest 2016 when I caught Meg ripping with Kevin Morby. The next year, Meg released their full-length Hand Habits debut, Wild Idle (Humble Before the Void). I reviewed the album and still find myself turning that title over in my head. I adored their follow-up, 2019’s placeholder, and described it at the time as reaching “new depths of intimacy when it comes to the topics of anxiety, loss, and forgiveness.”
Meg began playing with Perfume Genius and continued being a total sweetie shredder. 2021’s Fun House processed grief atop increasingly ambitious arrangements while the six songs on 2023’s Sugar the Bruise were an exercise in having fun and letting go a little bit. Meanwhile, Meg was recording making sick instrumental guitar improvisations with Greg Uhlmann.
Meg sounds reborn on the latest Hand Habits album, Blue Reminder. It’s a love album in the sense that Meg sings that word on nearly every song, but it’s more about acceptance and making peace with complexity and uncertainty. “Will you take me as I am?/Oscillating between/A woman, a child, and a broken man” they sing on the staggering title track. “If you stay with me I’ll let you meet all three.”
Meg and I caught up a few days before the release of Blue Reminder, out now via Fat Possum. I enjoyed this profile of them in the New York Times. Also, Meg has a great Substack, hit that subscribe button.
What’s changed in your life since Sugar the Bruise?
Pretty much everything. I’m in a relationship that’s lasted for three years so far, it’s the longest monogamous relationship I’ve had in my life. I’ve never lived with a partner for this long, like I’d live with some partners, more out of circumstance and necessity, not out of a desire to cohabitate and share space. So that’s new. I’m older, I’m in my mid-30s.
How does that feel?
I don't feel like what I thought 35 would be like when I was younger. But I was reflecting yesterday: I have a stable partnership, I feel pretty good about where my career is at, and that’s such a hard thing to talk about because career versus success…they’re always influencing each other. I think if my 28-year-old self could look into the future, I’d think that things were going pretty okay.
No alarm bells.
Thankfully, there are no personal crises; there are obviously many of the public kind. I got top surgery, I don’t have boobs anymore, which is amazing. Now, when I play guitar, it’s not this sort of thing, trying to get around. I play video games now.
I saw that you’ve been playing Breath of the Wild, which is becoming a recurring theme of my newsletter interviews.
A friend let me borrow her Switch while I recovered from my surgery. I tried to give it back to her when we were in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, and she told me to hold onto it. Zelda is such a complex character—heavy is the head that wears the crown.
How has your relationship with Hand Habits changed over the years?
It’s definitely a love-hate relationship. I go through phases of wanting to shelve the project, and then I inevitably make another record. Making Fun House with Sasami [Ashworth] and being in Perfume Genius for the last five years have really challenged me to be more open and curious. With Fun House, I was starting to “consider the listener,” as they say. With this one, while I of course want people to enjoy it, I just want to make something that I like. Something that Mike always says has become a mantra for me: “You can do whatever you want in the context of making art.” It’s true! I’m trying to make Hand Habit something that I enjoy and not something that I dread, because it’s complicated when your art becomes your business.
I really enjoyed the interview you did with Annie Bielski at “The Creative Independent” in which you mentioned that you are recognizing the “cyclical, seasonal pattern within [your] own creativity.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on what that means?
I’ve spent a lot of time in very close proximity to other songwriters, and it’s hard not to compare yourself to the people around you who are doing a similar thing. It’s so easy to get caught up in the consumerism of it all. You have labels and management, and everybody wants you to keep building and growing. I was reading this book called Being There, Wilco named an album after the movie adaptation. It’s about this character who constantly brings everything back to the metaphor of a garden. As corny as it sounds, I do think that’s a strong metaphor for art making because it’s not natural to have exponential production, that’s like a mutation. Being in other people’s bands and making instrumental music helps me have a well-rounded relationship with creativity without going crazy. I feel like Hand Habits would have stopped a long time ago if I didn’t have those other outlets because they keep me fresh, and I can go without thinking about songwriting for a year.
It can bite me in the ass sometimes. Going to a venue that a band I’m playing in has sold out is a very different experience when I return, having sold about 12 tickets. My record is coming out the same week that Perfume Genius is doing a couple of festivals overseas, and I realized that it’s probably not going to feel good for me to play a massive show with another band three days before my record comes out. I’ve done that enough now to know that I’m human, I get jealous, I get insecure. I’m not safe from either of those things—surprise. It’s the first time that I decided to see what happens if I make myself available and present with my own record.
I read that you may have felt pigeonholed by the title of an interview I did with you in 2019. I figured that we should discuss!
I mean, I always hate headlines like that; they’re embarrassing. I was grateful at the moment because it’s nice to put so much work into something and have it be recognized, and I have been a part of so many amazing records. I don’t know if I'm a “secret weapon,” but I think being “your favorite indie rockers’ favorite guitarist” or whatever is a very comfortable place for me since I came to songwriting almost by way of playing guitar in a bunch of other songwriters’ bands. Back then, around the time of that article, I used to feel like I wasn’t really a songwriter, even though I’d already made two records.
I felt like hot shit when I moved to LA, and I remember meeting a few guitarists and realizing that I have so far to go, I’m not even close. Joining Perfume Genius was one of those moments. Blake Mills told me that I was going to be asked to join the band and was playing me one of their songs. And I was, I can’t play this, it sounds like there are four things happening at once. I used to think I was way better than I was. LA is a big place, you can’t even throw a stone and not hit a guitar player here who can do everything that you can do but better, because they went to an arts high school with an amazing music program.
There do seem to be a lot of guitarists these days…What are some of the things you really wanted to challenge yourself on for Blue Reminder?
I wanted to challenge myself with the vocals. My relationship to my voice has changed in the last couple of years, partially again from being in Perfume Genius and having to sing with Mike every night. He’s such an amazing singer, and I had to rise to the occasion in a lot of ways, musically. Mike and Alan have been playing music together for, like, 15 years, so it was intimidating to try to figure out how to blend in there.
When I started taking hormones in 2019, my voice changed very slowly and subtly, but I was struggling for a little while, so I started taking voice lessons. They got me curious about my vocals and how to have more control over them. I’ve always been so hungry for knowledge and technique with the guitar, in an obsessive way, but I never had that with my voice until the last four years.
Another factor was that I wasn’t writing for my range, which is something that I learned way late. When I first started writing, I was trying to write songs like Greta Kline, Angel Olsen, Jenn Wasner [of Wye Oak and Flock of Doves], Emily Sprague, people who are my friends and have way higher voices. I was always straining and would sometimes lose my voice on tour. I slowly started modulating all my songs down, and that was huge. Now I play early songs like “Flower Glass” almost a fifth lower, I can’t sing it like it is on the record, partially because my voice has changed, and partially because…I don’t know how I even did it in the first place.
I wanted to lean into that confidence on this record. Joseph [Lorge], who produced the record with me, really helped with that, specifically with harmonies. He was like, “It wouldn’t make sense for you to have a double because this is a song from your perspective,” or, “Why would you have a harmony when you’re singing to someone?” I’d never thought about it like that.
I’ve always struggled with merging the guitar side of my identity with songwriting. People have said, “You don’t showcase your playing that much in your songwriting project.” That’s always been intentional because they’ve served such different purposes for me, but I wanted to figure out a way to merge them.
Musicians are increasingly tasked with promoting their work through social media content. I noticed that you are on TikTok and I found your daily blue object videos very charming, very “you.” That sort of promotion asks artists to be public-facing in slightly different ways than they are maybe used to. How are you handling it?
I did a “How To Play My Song” video, even though no one’s ever asked me to do that [laugh]. The guitar videos are an easy entry point for me because that’s what my Instagram looks like anyway. My partner made a super cut of outtakes from when I was filming stuff for Spotify Canvas, it looks like someone is putting a gun to my head. I didn’t start making music to become a salesman for my own self. I started making music to disappear from everything. I’ve had a lot of fun tagging Fat Possum and saying, “They're making me do this.” But I don’t want to not try and then be like, “Why didn’t anyone listen to my record?” I want to play the game a little, even if I’m not great at it.
For what it’s worth, I would absolutely watch a Meg Duffy “Get Ready With Me” video.
Thanks, Meg!