Even when they make music with words, Hand Habits’ songs are often more about the emotions lurking underneath. “The words behind the words,” is how Meg Duffy puts it, talking about the unique cadence of The National’s Matt Berninger, with whom they recently collaborated on the single ‘Breaking Into Acting’. In fact, ‘(Forgivness)’, an instrumental track from Hand Habits’ mesmerizing new album Blue Reminder, was almost overlaid with spoken word Berninger wrote specifically for it, until Duffy and co-producer Joseph Lorge decided against using it. Sometimes, even beautiful words aren’t right for a piece of music that can transport you on its own, a skill Duffy cultivates by going long periods of time making only instrumental music and playing in other people’s bands – previously Kevin Morby, now Perfume Genius. So while Blue Reminder is wonderfully arranged and subtly cinematic, the lyrics feel all the more carefully intimate, the phrasing more precise, the singing more confident – if only to serve the unspoken feeling of the song. “We don’t need to Talk Talk,” they sing early on, sneaking in a double entendre, “too much.” Which is enough to say they’re hungry for more.

We caught up with Hand Habits to talk about playing with Perfume Genius, their old Mt. Washington neighborhood, The Blue Nile, and other inspirations behind Blue Reminder.

Mt. Washington

You situate us in the environment of your old neighbourhood in Mt. Washington on the song ‘Jasmine Blossoms’, which is a really grounding moment on the record. How often did you go outside while making the record, and did you try to make a habit out of it?

It’s really easy for me not to go outside, especially when I’m working on music. I really have to remind myself. In my old studio, where I lived and wrote that song, I had post-its on the wall, and one of them said, “Go outside.” [laughs] Because I’m such a window gazer too, and I like the feeling of looking at the outside from inside. But every time I went outside there, I got a completely new perspective. It always felt like it was the right choice. I think my ADD can kick in, and I can be hyper-focused – and kind of ruin a song from that focus sometimes. But I really made it a habit. Also, it felt like I lived outside there a little bit, just because the house was really old – it’s a really old craftsman house in LA. Have you ever been here?

No, I haven’t.

Well, if you ever come here, especially in the winter, you’ll realize that every house has no insulation whatsoever. And it does actually get cold here. I know people don’t know that, but it does. I mean, it doesn’t get snow-freezing cold, but it gets cold. I’ve turned the heat on in LA. Every winter I do. And that house really felt like the veil between inside and outside was really thin. There was no insulation. The basement that I lived in was kind of illegally converted into this living space. No screens on any of the windows, and not a screen door, so I’d always just have the door open. Lots of spiders and creatures. It was in a really magical space for living in the city, too. There are all these staircases in LA that are part of walking in LA. Like, there’ll be this random staircase in a hilly neighborhood that takes you to another street. You couldn’t drive up to our house, which made loading my gear into the house horrible. [laughs] I don’t miss that at all. It’s really nice to pull into the driveway and walk into the house.

But it was a quarter mile from the street and totally surrounded by a yard on every side. Which, even if you live somewhere rural, that’s not always the case. So I was really spoiled and just got super lucky. The outdoors always felt like it was with me, no matter where I was, and it inspired so much of the record. Just the birds that would come and sing – and there were rats, too, literally – and the hawks. In the spring, it would be so amazing: everything would be really green. LA spring is very short, and so quickly everything just gets totally baked. But there’s this really magical window where everything’s alive and really lush – if we get water. When I was making this record, there were a couple rainy seasons too when I was writing. I just felt like it was a very inspiring place to be. And yeah, it was a habit of mine to go outside, but even if I wasn’t outside, it felt like I was.

It’s interesting that you talk about it from a seasonal perspective – maybe because of the song ‘Quiet Summer’, I experienced it mostly as a summer record. But it’s also very much about seasons changing, both literally and metaphorically.

Yeah, definitely. Because you notice the change more, I think. People love to say that LA doesn’t have seasons, but there are very much seasons. They’re just subtle, and they happen really fast, too. Change, I feel like, happens really fast. When I lived in upstate New York, it was easy to know, because it got colder every day, and then it would snow. Here, it’s a little more unpredictable, but they do change. And I feel like that change is really inspiring to me, just noticing something being different. And ‘Quiet Summer’, actually, was a holdover for this record. That was the first song, I think, that I wrote for this record. I wrote it while Sugar the Bruise was being mixed, actually. So it was a long time ago, for me, in terms of the timeline. I thought the whole record was gonna be more like that, but then it just changed.

In the statement you shared about ‘Jasmine Blossoms’, you talked about the disharmony between beauty and the horrors of the news cycle – that kind of contradiction. But I wanted to ask you about another question that arises on the album, which is what we can do with all this beauty, but also what beauty does to us. Were you preoccupied with beauty in a particular way while writing this record?

Thanks for noticing that. I can tell you really paid attention, and I really appreciate that. It just makes talking about it more fun for me. And it also makes me feel like the things I do aren’t just for me only – which is okay too, even if they are. But yeah, I was thinking a lot about beauty while writing this record. I had had this sort of creative/chaotic situationship with somebody, sort of in the early period of writing for this record. And ‘Quiet Summer’ – I was still going through that, but then I fell in love, so everything changed. But I found myself thinking about beauty a lot, especially during the making of Sugar the Bruise, too. I hate to bring it up because I know people don’t like to talk about it or think about it, but the pandemic, too – I was able to be an observer in such a different way than I had been when I was just constantly touring and grinding. And it really changed me. It changed my orientation to the world.

There were times when it felt like everything was so beautiful it hurt. [laughs] Even the beauty of death – I’m just being careful of what I say because I don’t want to say something stupid – how beautiful it is to be so human, I guess. How we are so at the mercy of ourselves as humankind. There’s things that are beautiful that I find to be extremely sad. I think specifically for this record, I was really turning over this idea of a childlike beauty and wonder, and how that can be a very easy escape. I have experienced being completely almost high on it, in a way. And also embarrassed of it, kind of.

Beauty can be so paradoxical sometimes. I think also from playing in Perfume Genius, where Mike’s lyrics are often about ugly things. Ugly Season, body horror, disgust, propulsion, and rotting. He’s really into that, and I feel sort of envious of being able to live in that space. When I talk about beauty, especially on this record, sometimes it’s almost satirical. Because there have been a couple times in my life where I’ve been almost seduced by beauty…

Being at the mercy of someone, as you put it on the title track.

Yeah, whether it’s someone else, or the way that they see the world. And finding meaning – I think there’s something connected to beauty and meaning for me. Finding coincidences or synchronicities – that’s really what I think of as God in the beautiful. But how that can also just be so trite. Living in Los Angeles, it can just be so cheap and fake too. There is this obsession with beauty that’s affected me. I’m curious about being more curious about ugliness, too. That is something I’m so exposed to from being in Perfume Genius, and it’s so much more fun to play something that’s ugly than it is to play something that’s beautiful.

Being in motion

I’m such a busybody. I’m a workaholic, and I find it hard to sit still. I’ve been touring now for 10 years. I started touring 10 years ago, and aside from 2020 to 2021-and-a-half, I haven’t really stopped moving. And it’s hard for me to stop moving. I really need to, though. I need stillness in my life. That’s when I do my best writing, and it’s when I’m the best friend and the best partner, when I take a beat and not just cram it in. I remember before 2020, I found a calendar where I used to keep all my dates, and I would handwrite them. If I had that schedule now, I would have a nervous breakdown. [laughs] It was back-to-back hour meetings with friends, or trying to play music. I like being in motion. It can kind of take over for me, and I can start self-oscillating, I think, a little bit.

But going on walks was that way of calming my mind while also being in motion. I’m not good at meditating – which, no one can really be good at meditating – but walking, I feel like, was a perfect mix of: I leave my phone, and just be present with the world while still moving, trying to pause my mind and not be planning, not texting someone right when I think of them. I think one thing that’s great from being on tour a lot, that is really inspiring, is you do get to see a lot of the world go by. On this last tour I was on with Perfume Genius, I kept saying we were in the “piss district,” because you go from one piss district to the next. You really do get to see what’s going on with America. It’s not great, when you take a cross-section of every downtown that you visit. I think it’s really important to get out of the place that you come from, and I think that’s always kind of been a motivating force for me creatively.

Do you find yourself writing less, or just soaking up what’s happening around you, when you’re on the road?

Yeah, I can’t really write on the road. I’ll maybe journal and then go back to things, but I’m too tired. That’s not what it’s for, for me. I know people who are so prolific like that, and I just can’t. I need to be home and procrastinate for two months before I start writing.

The Blue Nile’s A Walk Across the Rooftops

I love the arrangements on that record, how they take these songs that I feel like couldn’t always even be played on one instrument solo. They sound like they’re written in the studio or written with a band in mind. I don’t know anything about Paul Buchanan’s approach to songwriting – I know a little because a friend of mine has been working on music with him, which is so crazy. But if I had to guess, I’d say he probably writes a lot in the studio. And I love that – it’s collaborative, you know? It inevitably will be. And I just think that record sounds so good, too. It’s so hi-fi, and every instrument feels like it has its own place. I was really inspired by how some of the grooves were crafted and what the roles of each instrument were. There are a lot of interlocking patterns, sort of this patchwork of a rhythm section – maybe the guitar is doing a lot of the rhythm work or a very pizzicato string synth patch is the driving force.

I went back to that record a lot while we were mixing, too. Joseph, who produced and mixed the record – he produced it with me and mixed it on his own – loves that music, so we would reference it. It just sounds so full and big, and you get these very clear sonic pictures. I feel like it’s underrated, too, because people know Hats a lot.

I can hear some of the intricate grooves on that record, set against his vulnerable voice, echoed on Blue Reminder.

When I was rehearsing last week with the new drummer, Sam KS, he was like, “Your songs are really hard.” [laughs] To me, that felt like a compliment. It was validating, because I’ve been in situations where people put me into folk, indie folk, or even sometimes say my songs are country. And I’m like, this isn’t country music, and it’s not folk music. Maybe it’s structurally or lyrically that, but not rhythmically or from an arranger’s point of view. I’m really addicted to how people play off each other and how they can subvert the roles of their instrument.

Darick Campbell’s ‘End of My Journey’

It’s a wonderfully atmospheric track that reminds me of the middle stretch of Blue Reminder, with ‘Way It Goes’ bleeding into ‘(Forgiveness)’. What resonated with you about it?

It’s just creating an emotion with instruments. That’s why I started playing guitar. Music is incredible in that way, where just instruments can create a feeling – and the feeling might mean something different to everyone. Like, if you say “love” to someone, you don’t know how I experience that or how you experience that. But people can feel things from music without words, and that’s one of the coolest things about our art form. That song makes me cry. It’s so powerful, triumphant, and you can hear the pain in it. And there aren’t even words. I think I’ll always strive for that in instrumental music – it plays such a big role in my life. To be honest with you, I find it more enjoyable than singing a song. It’s always been part of the records I make, since day one, but I want to keep incorporating it more and more.

That song is also really patient, but then you hear everyone cresting at the same time. It’s this psychic understanding and reaction. That’s my favorite part about playing with the people on this record – we just know each other. We’ve developed this musical language, so if someone goes somewhere, we all follow.

I went back to that track also because the guitar tone is so good. He’s such a crazy player, and he’s clearly talking to God in this way. Every time it comes on, I’m like, “Jesus Christ, I never play like that.”

Are there times when you have an instrumental or a piece of music that feels too precious to write or sing over?

Well, it’s funny you ask that, because actually, ‘(Forgiveness)’ – first, originally it was five minutes longer, but we had to cut it down for the vinyl. We all set up in the studio. Tim Carr, who’s playing drums and percussion, Greg Uhlmann, who I also have a project with that’s instrumental guitar music – we shut off the light, got these pedals, mallets, and contact mics. Phil and Joseph mic’d things interestingly – lots of room mics, but also close ones, with some distortion on quietly played sounds. We were playing with dynamics in this way. Before Danny Aged came in, there was this really long time where we just kept playing and recorded it all. I knew it could become something. A lot of Sugar the Bruise was written that way, too – just improvising and forming something out of it.

Danny came in and played on that song, and when we got to the ‘Way It Goes’ part – it’s all just one song to me, I keep forgetting we split it into two – I told him to just keep playing over the percussion loop. There were some melodic and harmonic parts, but it was pretty open-ended. He locked in immediately with the groove, and it was one of those studio moments where I was like, “Holy shit.” He just knew where it was going. We were all like, “What the fuck? How did you know that was gonna happen?” Then I took it home and improvised piano over it. The end piano part is all me, just reharmonizing around it.

Originally, when I first heard that piece – with the piano, the bass, the percussion, and all this sort of thing – Alan actually played some flute over it, too, and we effected it. I had heard Matt Berninger’s voice in my head, because he does such a good talk-singy thing, and he has so much emotion. Sometimes when he’s talking to me, I’m just like, “What were you saying?” His voice is so meditative and emotional to me. I feel like I can really hear the emotions behind the words, or the words behind the words. So I sent it to him, and I said, “Would you be up for writing something to sort of speak over this?” I kept hearing a spoken thing. I had also heard Kevin Morby’s voice a little bit, but I think he was busy or on tour.

Was that before ‘Breaking Into Acting’?

I don’t remember if it was before or after we recorded it – it was definitely before it came out. But he sent over something, and I felt embarrassed to say this to him, but I was like, “I actually feel like having words over this isn’t making it more effective.” I was scared to tell him that, too, because I look up to him, and he took the time to do it. I definitely didn’t pay him to do it – I couldn’t have afforded to, even if I tried. But I told him, “Thank you for doing this,” and it was beautiful what he wrote, but it just didn’t add anything. Joseph and I had that moment together, where we were like, “This is more compelling as just its own piece of composed music.” And I’m really glad, because now it’s one of my favorite parts of the record. When we play it live, people aren’t surprised if we want to open it up.

Joseph Lorge

Joseph and I had been friends for a while, and I’d worked with him on a couple of other things. He’s mixed some things for me before, and I’ve never had any notes whenever I sent him something. He always made it sound way better, without me being able to put my finger on why. This was back when I was less involved with production or even light mixing. I’m not a professional mixer at all and I don’t know how to make something sound better – usually when I mix, it sounds worse. [laughs] But when I’ve brought stuff to him, he just has this subtle magic, this beautiful, secret talent – not so secret – of knowing how to make the music come out of the song more. He knows how to change one thing, and when I’ve watched him mix, I’ll be like, “What are you even doing?” He’s barely doing anything, but he can really put things into focus.

I think he’s very heart-focused and emotionally approaching music. Honestly, the only other person I know who works like that, in a technical sense, is Blake [Mills], who Joseph worked with for 12 years. They know how to make something happen from a technical point of view, but it’s serving an emotional function. I don’t have that skill – I’m mostly emotion. With Joseph, I really trust him. And I think he was trusting me, too, because this was the first record he produced on his own, without someone else overseeing. He has since stepped away from working as Blake’s engineer and has been doing his own thing.

We learned a lot together. I trust his musical taste, and his ear is crazy. His ear for rhythm is amazing. On ‘Way It Goes’, actually, he played some just crazy guitar, too. I didn’t even know he played guitar. I will make another record with him. It was such a great experience, and I felt like there was room for my ideas. We collaborated super well in that way.

In other situations I’ve been in – for example, with Sasami, who produced Fun House – she’s very vision-oriented, and she knows exactly what she’s trying to achieve. Joseph is very flexible and would never put his agenda on something. Whatever my idea was, he’d just make it work – not necessarily better, but work. And I really appreciated that about making this record.

Playing with Perfume Genius

Bringing a lot of his close collaborators, including Blake Mills and Alan Wyffels, into Blue Reminder – was that just a natural decision?

Sort of, yeah. I joined Perfume Genius five years ago now, at the same time as Gregory, Tim, and Pat [Kelly] – we all joined at the same time. Mike and Alan are a couple, and they’ve been working with Blake on records. I think Glory is their fourth record with him. And they’ve also worked a lot with Joseph, who engineered all those records. Blake and I had become friends before I joined Perfume Genius – we met through LA – and he’s been sort of a mentor to me, in a light way, just being this music angel. And he was the reason I joined Perfume Genius. I remember being in the studio with him. He asked me to come by Sound City, and he was like, “I’ll just play you some stuff I’ve been working on.” And he played me the lead single from their last record, ‘On the Floor’. I remember hearing it and being like, “Who’s gonna play that live? That’s crazy.” There was this insane guitar on that song, and nobody else could do it the way he did. I was like, “Are you gonna tour them?” And he’s like, “No. They’re gonna ask you to do it.” And I was like, “What? I can’t do that.”

At the time, I definitely could not do it, and that sort of made my friendship with Blake a little deeper, too, because I would just bug him and be like, “I don’t know what voicings you’re using on this. How did you get this sound? Can you send me a video of you playing this part?” It wasn’t because I was lazy and didn’t want to do the work myself. It was really that I was coming up against the threshold of my ability. And that hadn’t happened to me, honestly, kind of ever in my life since I started playing guitar. That was the first hurdle of, like, burning through. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

Joining a band with these people – we joined during 2020, so we weren’t touring. It was right when people started getting together again, and we did this live video at the Palace Theater, and we rehearsed for a whole month with that band. That never happens. You never get to do that. But nobody had anything going on, we had infinite time, and it was very big fortune because we learned how to play really well together without going on the road. That’s not something that’s common for touring bands. Maybe if you’re a band-band, that’s something you can do. Because of that, I really learned how to play with Tim and Pat and Greg and Alan, instrumentally.

I was singing – and I am singing — all the harmonies with Mike when we play live, and with Alan singing too. That gave me huge confidence for my vocals. I had to learn how to sing with Mike, and I needed to match him. I wanted to blend with him. Some of those songs are really hard to sing. ‘Slip Away’ is like a pop song. I don’t have pop vocal chops – I definitely had way less when I joined the band. But I started taking vocal lessons sort of to be in that band. It really changed me as a musician. It changed me as a guitar player, for sure, from learning these songs that Blake wrote all the guitar parts for. And then singing with Mike and learning his phrasing and melodic tendencies, just blending with him in the best way that I could. It really has had a profound effect on my musicianship.

And then Alan, I have to say, is such a huge part of this record. There’s so much of him on this record, and he’s a secret weapon, I feel like, in a lot of ways. He would just write these perfect parts. He’s such a composer, and he’s demented too. That flute line on ‘Blue Reminder’ is him playing flute, and it’s him playing piano. On ‘Way It Goes’, he’s playing flute and also piano. On ‘Nubble’, he’s doing those arpeggiations. On ‘Dead Rat’, he came up with the most perfect way of embodying the dead rat itself, melodically. He’s a genius.

I also get along with him so well because we’re both from upstate New York. I’m really fortunate to have met all of these people and develop such deep relationships with them outside of music, and then also being able to live in this realm with them. I’m sad he’s not able to tour with me on this cycle, and I’ve had to take some time away from Perfume Genius because I need to do my own thing. I’m doing more touring with them in the fall. But yeah, that more than anything has changed me as a musician.

Do you feel like there’s a kind of push-and-pull in how playing with Perfume Genius bleeds into your outlet as Hand Habits? Is there a tension you’ve become more conscious of?

It can get tiring, for sure, but it’s not new to me. I did this when I was in Kevin Morby’s band, too. I would do double duty – recording a record on the days I wasn’t on tour with Kevin, opening for him, and also playing in the band. I’ve done that with Mega Bog. I really like doing that. This year is busy – the busiest I’ve been in a long time. But I’m grateful to have work, grateful to be busy. It can be tense sometimes. I didn’t get to do the Jimmy Fallon late-night performance with them because I was recovering from a surgery. The biggest tension is because we’re all friends, too. I don’t want to let them down, and they don’t want to let me down. Even though we understand it can’t always work out, and it’s not personal, it can be a tension in that way.

At the release show, it was interesting because Mike and Alan came, and I was so nervous they were there – especially Alan, watching someone else play all these parts that he wrote. At least me, Mike, and Alan are like family. And so sometimes it’s hard to separate work from friendship. But we’ve learned how to communicate really well with each other in terms of that stuff. I like the tension, and I am aware of it, and I need it too. I can’t just only be doing Hand Habits because it drives me crazy. I feel like it’s too much me. I need someone else to be the one making decisions and doing the talking.

Song a Day writing club

This was organized by Philip Weinrobe, right? How long were you involved in it, and how did it reorient your songwriting?  

It’s one week, usually. It just sort of forced me to get over a hurdle that I was approaching rapidly with songwriting. It was after Sugar the Bruise, and I just – I don’t know, I felt like it was kind of a flop. I don’t know why. I think I just felt like no one really paid attention, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wasn’t even trying to make a record, but then that kind of happened for many reasons, so I was a little bit burnt out on writing songs in general. I was really focusing on Perfume Genius and being a session person, which I love doing. I couldn’t say no when Phil asked me, because he’s very persuasive, almost a bully in that way. Blake was actually in the writing group. It was very small, and there were a couple other musicians in there who I highly respect and want them to think the best of me.

The way that the songwriting club works is that if you don’t submit a song by the end of the day, you’re out. You’re no longer on the emails, and you don’t get to hear what people write anymore. You can’t come back in, it’s very exclusive, and that’s the incentive, is that you get to hear these amazing songwriters’ versions of unfinished songs that they can’t work on for days and days and days. There’s no edits. I became completely obsessed with trying to make the best thing I could possibly make in 16 hours, because I needed to sleep at some point. In the first three days, I was pulling on all the stops, I was doing a lot of harmonizing, crazy voice leading, trying to be super witty with the lyrics and reference things that I knew that they would know. I knew I was writing for everyone else. And in the first three days, the three people who I admired the most dropped out. They were like, “It’s too hard, I can’t do it.” And then I started writing for me.

That was a really good lesson to learn, because none of the songs that I thought were so good at the time, showing off my abilities – they were way overwritten and crazy, and they weren’t good, either, because it was not… true. It wasn’t true to me. ‘Way It Goes’, I wrote in that class, and there was another one that didn’t make it on the record, but I think I will record it at a certain time. I think ‘Jasmine Blossoms’ also was written in there, too. It just breaks the seal, too, of writer’s block – I don’t like to think about it that way, because I feel like that’s it’s like a cancer diagnosis or something in terms of creativity, and I think it’s a little problematic, but these ebbs and flows, and I was really in an ebb. And it also reminds you that you don’t have to keep everything, and everything you write doesn’t have to be good. It was also a great way to get into demo brain, and I was writing and making these choices and not thinking too hard about them. I haven’t done another one since then, just because it takes over my life. I will go so hard.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Hand Habits’ Blue Reminder is out now via Fat Possum.