Hand Habits on Rats, the Pandemic, and Embracing Your Secret Weapon

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

I've followed Meg Duffy's career as Hand Habits very closely, and their new album Blue Reminder (out tomorrow!) is the latest captivating songwriting evolution of their fascinating career. I had Meg on the newsletter back in 2021, when this newsletter was still in its relative infancy—so it was great to have them back again to talk all things regarding what they've been up to since, including but not limited to their impressive list of recent collaborations with other artists and their time playing in Perfume Genius' band. Check it out:

How did the recent Perfume Genius tour go?
It was really fun. I love playing in that band. It was the first time I've done a full U.S. tour, probably in at least three years—and I loved getting into the groove of that kind of long haul. I was definitely tired, and I'm older now, so it takes a toll— but it's a super fun band to play in.

I recently talked to Mike about the anxiety he feels before performing. What's that like for you as a performer, both when you're on sideperson duty and when you're the main event?
After five years of being in a band with Mike, I could notice the anxiety a little bit more. Maybe in the beginning, it was a little bit more under the radar. But, you know, it's a beautiful thing. I think about performing a lot, because I'm either doing it or a part of someone else doing it for the last 12 years at this point. Without anxiety, it wouldn't be the same, because it's a strange dynamic.

I was especialy thinking about that a lot on this Perfume Genius tour, where the set is a lot more high-octane. Everybody on stage was seated except for Mike, and I was really trying to meet the energy of the music—and of Mike, who literally launches himself off of an exercise ball and a riser. It's very physical, and some nights the crowd is engaged, and there's the feedback loop that you want when you perform that kind of music, and you can feel the energy.

And some nights, people seem confused, or not as engaged. Those are the nights—and this happens no matter the kind of music I'm playing, whether I'm singing or not—when I'm way more hyper aware of it when I'm singing and having to carry the band or the performance. On those nights, the anxiety is really tangible. There's some nights where I'm just a little bit higher than the people down there, which is strange—and I'm not always having a good time. There could be sound issues, or I could be tired. But I have to really look like I'm having a good time, because that's part of the commitment that you make as a performer. Obviously, there's legendary exceptions, like Cat Power not fulfilling her role in that social contract. But if people aren't giving you what you want when you're a performer, you still kind of have to give them what you think they want.

For me, and especially in this next cycle of songs that I'm going to be touring, I've been rehearsing for a solo show that I'm playing, opening for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—and first of all, I'm not in solo brain at all. I'm in side-guy brain right now. So that's a pretty big shift. Second of all, it's a huge show, and I'm so nervous, so I have to do this trick to myself where I say I'm nervous a lot—just so that when I get up there and do it, I've already come to terms with the fact that there's anxiety underneath what I'm doing. I have to get myself into the pre-game mode of, "You got this. You're really good at guitar"—even though, in the back of my mind, there's like the devil's voice that's like, "You are not, though, and you will fail." It's an addicting and terrifying balance of, of that.

It's funny that you mentioned Chan Marshall, because whenever I get something I don't expect in what some would consider a bad way, I'm like, "Oh, this was interesting."
I think about that a lot. I've been going to so many shows—which, you have to—and the clean shows that are just perfect...that's not what like drew me to the music in the first place. Indie music, obviously, we can talk for hours about how that identifier and qualifier has changed, how the aesthetic has changed. But what started getting me really excited about music, when I made my first record, was thatit was not clean at all. I was using one microphone, I was making a lot of loops, and everything was probably out of phase—and I had the most fun doing that. It was more about exploration and and unexpected happy accidents—and the same goes for performances too.

I want to try to embrace that, because when people prepare for a show—and I hear Mike say it all the time—we're always thinking, "We just want to do a good job." It's a lot of pressure. It feels like your career's on the line, like you're only as good as your last performance. For people who are working in music, there's a lot of pressure to really serve. That goes, at least, for indie. I don't know about pop, because people aren't thinking as critically. They're like, "I just want to go and see Troye Sivan." It's a lifestyle thing.

But when I forget lyrics or something, I've gotten to the point where now I'm like, "I'm gonna just start over," or, "I don't remember these words—does anyone know them?" I don't feel as afraid to break the third wall.

Tell me about the new territory you explored on this latest record.
I hate to talk about the pandemic, but obviously that gave a lot of people a deep inner reflection time on their creative process, amongst so many other things. It wasn't just all sitting around, thinking about what kind of art I wanted to make—but I had a lot more time, and Sugar the Bruise was a funny process for me personally, and kind of challenging. When I went in to make that record, I wasn't going in to make a Hand Habits record. That wasn't the goal. But improvisation has always been like a huge part of my musical food pyramid. It's how I got into music—playing guitar, improvising, soloing, making these soundscapes, and getting lost in them. And that's led to me making other records with other people, too. But with Sugar the Bruise, I didn't think i was going to make a "songs" record. It was super collaborative with Luke Temple, and for some of those songs I was just trying something new.

I've also learned a lot through playing in Perfume Genius, and from Ugly Season. Mike just went into the studio with Blake and Alan and made whatever they wanted to make, with the intention that it was going to be the score for a dance piece. I'm not doing any sort of dance piece anytime soon—but I reached this moment after Sugar the Bruise where I swung the pendulum super far into, "What if I make house music that's about colonialism?" That was random for me, and I didn't have that much fun playing that music. I could tell that I was trying to be someone else, and obviously there's a little that goes into that with performing music—but there's not a huge separation between that and the me that's home. I'm not playing a character.

Sasami and I have talked about it before. She's always occupying these different characters and I'm not doing drag—I'm oversharing details of my life out of anxiety onstage in the song and in the banter. That was how I started writing songs in the first place. My first record was honestly exploring my subconscious through song. I know that sounds corny, but it's just how I ended up there.

For Blue Reminder, I took a really long time getting these songs ready. It's the longest I've ever taken workshopping songs. I demoed them all out, and in some of the demoing processes it sounded pretty full and rich. I wanted the band that I've been playing with in Perfume Genius, because there's inevitably going to be cross-contamination when spending this much time playing music with people. So I figured out a lot of these arrangements with these musicians that I've been playing with for the last five years, and that was something that I hadn't done before. I either do pretty much everything myself and bring in one or two people or, for Placeholder, I only met the drummer for that record at the session and we arranged it from the demos there.

It was super fun to arrange differently with the band in mind. A lot of the basic tracks were captured playing together live, instead of me recording one track and having everybody play over it individually, I'm addicted right now to the energy that people playing music in a room creates, and I wanted that energy that has informed how I feel time rhythmically with these people. I've gone through a musical identity change after playing in Perfume Genius for a while, just inevitably, if you immerse yourself in anything for five years, it's gonna come out in the way that you're expressing yourself.

The instrumentation felt really natural, and I took my time. I'm with Fat Possum now, and nobody was saying, "OK, you have to get a record out this year." It was the first time with a record that I've gone in and re-recorded a song after getting kind of far on it. Maybe it's sounding like I had a huge budget—that's not true. But I also did a lot of it on my own. It was the first record in a while where I was taking the sessions home and working on them without anyone else. I also trusted Joseph Lorge, who produced it, and Phil Hartunian, who engineered it, so much. Joseph is always the person in the room where I'm like, "What are you thinking?" With everyone involved, we had a musical language developed, and you can't really fake that over time. Time was really the factor for this record.

You said before, "I hate talking about the pandemic. Which, I understand for sure, but I am also, maybe to a fault, always kind of talking or thinking about the pandemic. It's replaced 9/11 for me in terms of, "Here's something that changed my outlook on everything forever."
I just want to say that I actually like talking about it. No one else cares, and they're like, "We're done with this. We don't talk about this anymore."

You took the words right out of my mouth. There was this really asinine New York magazine piece where they asked a bunch of cool idiots in the city about their thoughts on post-pandemic stuff—this was, like, 2022—and someone was like, "Everybody's done talking about this. It's over. We all want to move on." I read that and had this reaction like, "Honestly? Fuck you." This killed people! This impacted people's lives! But I do feel like like people are starting to get a little more comfortable again with being like, "Okay, I am ready to consider this horrible, traumatic thing that we all endured." How have you reflected on that period of time?
That's such a huge question, because the short answer is that everything changed, and in ways that I'm still trying to understand now. Not even just the music industry, which has been ravaged by it—and the economy, where everything got more expensive but the amount of money people pay you didn't go up for most people. We all got older, which is psychedelic, because normally there's not this marker like that. We've never experienced that in our society.

I don't want to say that there's like an age for a "prime time for a career," because that's really ageist and isolating—but I do think there's an age where you have the energy to tour for six weeks and your priorities can be focused on what it means to have a career in music or art, which takes a lot of mental energy to think about. For me, I'm in a way more stable and committed relationship because I wasn't touring for so long, and I could see these patterns in myself where I got addicted to being like, "I gotta go. I'm gonna be on the road and living this very devil-may-care life." It makes it easier to be gone when you don't have a lot of other priorities—when you're a little bit younger and you're not in like a stable relationship or thinking about having kid.

With the pandemic and lockdown, I did a lot of soul-searching, went to deep therapy, and got to understand my like relationship habits and patterns and rework them in a huge way. Also, my drive for getting in a van with five people and driving across across the country to lose $6,000 is a lot lower. I'm not like, "Yeah, that sounds fun." I like being home and hanging out with my partner and making sure I'm not worried about if my friends are forgetting me anymore.

I think that has really affected my career and the way I think about it—and when I say "my career," I'm using that word interchangeably with the financial stability it takes to make and put out records, because I don't want you to get the sense that I think that having a career means making money. Being an artist doesn't mean having a career, but having a career doesn't always mean being an artist. Some people have careers, and I'm not really sure why. But with the pandemic, I feel like everybody in the music industry is burnt out. There's been a lot of changeover, and it's made a lot of the logistics—both on touring and making records—a lot harder for artists.

The kind of art that I'm making is inherently different with Blue Reminder. There's some holdover songs from the pandemic—when I was going through the emotional rolodex, so to speak, sorting out some of that stuff—and a lot of these songs are also the result of, "Oh, I'm in a stable relationship," and that brings up other things that I want to talk about. The narrative as it stands for me, as a songwriter, has always been to write about grief or heartbreak. That's just how I've processed things. I don't sit down like, "I'm gonna write a song about Jenny and her phone number." With Sugar the Bruise, I was trying to do that. I was like, "I'm gonna write a song about a statue I've never seen in Germany." This new record feels more true to me.

But with the pandemic, if it never happened, I don't know where I would be or what kind of record I would've made. It's possible I would've just kept crushing it, touring with other people and kicking the can down the road. I don't really know. In terms of art, I'm always impressed with people who have these long careers and manage to write seven records or something. They always have some sort of new perspective—whether it's on the same thing, or they just figure out different channels. With the pandemic, for me, I didn't want to just keep writing about how I've been wronged. I didn't want to stay in this grief feedback loop, thinking about my dead mother and all the things I didn't have. I started to zoom out and be like, "Okay, that might be why I don't feel like playing shows that often."

I'm reliving these traumas that have informed my art in such a huge way that I think is beautiful, and a lot of people like respond to—but we are all traumatized from the pandemic, and I feel like, for this record, it's okay that I'm in a better place, even though the world is not. That made its way into this record.

The contributions you've had on other peoples' records over the last six or seven years has been really extensive. I talked to Alynda from Hooray for the Riff Raff last year about how you're a secret weapon in the studio. You worked with a lot of people on Blue Reminder as well. What did you observe when it comes to bringing other people in this time around and turning the tables, so to speak?
Something that I really leaned into making this record was to really trust the musicians and the choices that they're making. That was why I wanted those people in the room with me—because I already knew that I trusted them.

Greg Uhlmann, who I've made two records together, we've been close collaborators and dear friends for over six years now. I trust him, and I don't even really need to give him direction—but if I do give him direction, I trust that he'll interpret whatever direction I give in a way that will be exactly it—or it'll surprise me and I'll be like, "Whoa, I didn't think of that approach." He's often the one on the recordings, when we were mixing or trying to get the lay of what we've tracked, where I'm like, "There's something integral happening that my ear would never gravitate towards." But when you mute it, you're like, something's not working.

That is not my secret weapon. Ppart of what makes my secret weapon a weapon— it's feeling weird to say that word over and over again, that's my fault. I watched Arrival last night. Have you seen that movie?

Oh yeah. A bunch of times.
You know when the heptapods say, "The weapon is a gift?" That's the context we're talking about right now. I feel like my self-awareness from what you said is my secret weapon is knowing what I can and cannot do. I can play a guitar solo, I can respond energetically. I know that Greg can really lock into a pocket and play something that doesn't sound like a guitar and compliments melodically and rhythmically at the same time. I know that Tim Carr, the drummer, can play something that's not exactly what I was hearing but where I'm like, "Yeah, this is emotional." That's super hard to accomplish, especially in a recording setting. Live, it's easy to do, because you have the visual and you can feel the music in your body—but Tim is really good at translating that into a recording. I want to mention Pat Kelly too, because he'll come in and play what he wrote perfectly one, maybe two times because he's classically trained. On "Dead Rat," his part that he played, I always tell him, "That's the smell in the wall." He's able to capture something emotionally and unexpected.

There's one story from recording, the one day where I had the most people in the studio with me—Danny Aged, Rose Droll, Tim Carr, Greg, Joseph, and Phil—obviously, the most expensive day for me. We were supposed to track two songs, and as soon as we set up to record, we hadn't had arrangements and I was like, "These are the demos, I'll play the song and let's try to find something together," and then the power went out at the studio, and I was like, "No problem." In hindsight, it was kind of weird that I had that response. Phil pointed out to me, "You were really chill, and I was expecting you to really be stressed out." So, good job, me. I was like, "Let's all get acoustic instruments," and we ended up tracking "Living Proof" and "Beauty 62."

For "Living Proof," I had no idea what that song was going to become. I thought it was going to be more of a normal indie song—honestly, I thought it was going to be kind of boring and straight-ahead. I love that song now thanks to Sam at Fat Possum, who pushed me to record it—because that one to me was kind of a throwaway, I can't really explain to you why. But we all sat around with acoustic instruments and the piano and came up with this watery, emotional feeling that recontextualized the song—and that wouldn't have happened without the power going out.

It was the same with "Beauty 62." We started that doing that when the power came back on after we went to lunch for two hours, and I was like, "Okay, we only have three hours left." Tim and Danny were doing this Prince-like thing—Danny was playing synth bass, and it was really funky, which is not normally my instinct when I'm left to my own devices. It sounds like a cliché, but we were all jamming and I was like, "This is working, let's do it." Because I'd already surrendered to the day and what it was with the power going out—losing this time—I was way more open, and I really like where we landed. These unexpected hurdles that happen in the studio can actually be the secret weapon, too. You lean into whatever's happening, and that does require a lot of trust in the people that you're working with too.

You mentioned "Dead Rat," which, as a New Yorker, is a tough thing to hear about. I'm literally dealing with rats in my car. It's really bad. But I'm also dealing with rats in my building specifically. Over the last year and a half, I guess we had a family of rats die in the walls of the building's atrium. On that note, I'm very curious to hear you talk about your own adventures as a presumptive renter over the years, because it's a very specific thing that I feel like is maybe not talked about enough.
I'm talking about it, Larry. You gotta talk about it.

I'm talking about it!
"Dead Rat" is a true story, but not as bad as yours. Yours sounds horrible. If we had a family, I wouldn't be like, "I'm gonna write a little song about this." I'd be like, "I'm moving out." But you can't always move out. My landlord basically was like, "There's nothing we can do unless you want to open up the wall"—and I didn't really want to do that. It became this metaphor for the parts of yourself that are maybe rotting metaphorically. Maybe this is a human thing—I don't really know, I hope it is—but you're ike, "I'm not going to deal with that right now. I know that it's making my personality smell like a dead animal, but I don't really feel like taking a sledgehammer to the drywall and trying to find this carcass of something someone said to me when I was seven."

It was one of those songs that just came out like immediately, which I call "open channel songs"—when the channels open, and the heptapods give you a song. While I was recording the demo, the smell was horrible—it was at the apex of it, and I also wouldn't open windows that much at my house because there's no screens. and I lived in this part of L.A. where there's weirdly a lot of mosquitoes, and they were brutal and would bite me in the night. It was the same house that I made Fun House in with Kyle Thomas. He lived upstairs, and he actually couldn't smell the rat, which made it worse, because I lived downstairs and he was like, "I don't smell it up here."But he did have raccoons on the ceiling on the roof that I couldn't hear, and he wrote a song about that called "Cross-Eyed Critters."

Before my partner and I lived together, she would come to my house and be like, "You have to open a window. It's rank in here." She'd light a candle and open a window, and I remember having one day where I was like, "What is wrong with me? I need a reality check here." But, honestly, that's my favorite song on the record, and I'm glad that it's going to hopefully make some New Yorkers like you feel seen.