Instead, the tracks on Fun House sparkle, moving in unexpected directions and eschewing any specific genre. While Fun House shares some of the same hallmarks as previous Hand Habits releases - a kind of outre queer sensibility, a gentle sense of vulnerability - the record is a marked sonic departure from the often muted tones of 2019's Placeholder and 2017's Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void). I think this also coincides with my trans identity too, because so much of that journey for me has been me really fighting against what I'm not "allowed" to be." I wouldn't allow myself to step into certain roles because of the little box I was putting myself in based on all of these false narratives that I had come to believe about myself. "Sasami empowered me to take up a lot of different sonic spaces and challenged me to rethink these limitations that I had about my own identity. "I felt a massive shift in the way that I was seeing the world and seeing myself, moving through certain emotional patterns and behavioral patterns, and really taking them apart," explains Duffy. The new songs also became a prism through which Duffy could begin to self-actualize in a new way. Emboldened by going into therapy and coaxed by Ashworth to push the songs into unexpected new shapes, the resulting music was more acutely personal and stylistically adventurous than anything they had attempted before. Grounded in LA and sharing a house with Ashworth and Thomas, who also runs a studio space in the building, Duffy began to flesh out the songs that would eventually become Fun House. What started out as a very personal reckoning eventually blossomed into a fruitful and convenient means of making new music. I 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." Then, when the world basically stopped, it turned out to be the longest I've been alone in my entire life - without being in a relationship, without being on the road, without working myself to exhaustion - and the result was really like, holy shit.
#Hand habits full
It had been full pedal to the metal in terms of traveling and scheduling, which meant I really didn't have a lot of time to think about how I felt or really check in with myself. "I had been touring consistently for five years, both on my own and playing in other people's bands, so I wasn't really writing a lot in between. "When the pandemic happened, everything stopped," recalls Duffy. Produced by Sasami Ashworth (SASAMI) and engineered by Kyle Thomas (King Tuff), the record was not intended as a reaction to the pandemic, but it was very much the result of taking a difficult, if much-needed, moment of pause. "I know the answer," Duffy sings, "Here's what I hope to find - it's always mine."įun House is Duffy's most ambitious Hand Habits album to date. How much time must we spend examining our own past in order to fully understand it? How can we safely acknowledge pain in order to release it and fully actualize who we are supposed to be? Buffeted by strings, synths, and a gently-shook tambourine, the aptly-titled track, "The Answer," highlights the emotional engine at the heart of the record.
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#Hand habits how to
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.There is a moment halfway through Hand Habits' Fun House at which musician Meg Duffy asks the question, "How many times must I rewind the tape?" It's a fitting question planted squarely in the middle of a sonically adventurous record concerned largely with making sense and taking stock.
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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."
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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. A gorgeous progression from Wildly Idle, placeholder captures Duffy's transfixing intimacy in elevated form.