Hand Habits: To Need and Be Needed

In the first chapter of their career, Meg Duffy established themselves as an in-demand session player, appearing on records by the War on Drugs, Mega Bog, William Tyler, and Weyes Blood. They were a longtime fixture in Kevin Morby’s band, playing on City Music and Oh My God before becoming Perfume Genius’ lead guitarist—the role they’re currently in. Even in the 2020s alone, Duffy’s credits are immense: Christian Lee Hutson, SASAMI, Matt Berninger, claire rousay. And that’s just the introductory course. When I listen to their parts on Meija’s “There’s Always Something,” or Marina Allen’s “Red Cloud,” I am snared by a gun-for-hire guitar sound I’ve been able to recognize since 2017, since their debut album, Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void).

But in the years since, Duffy’s solo work has quietly grown away from their instrument. The quiet of placeholder in 2019 turned into Fun House two years later, an album that gleaned woodwinds and electronica from SASAMI’s most-offbeaten impulses. Duffy was less dependent on guitars, which opened the door for streaks of well-placed brilliance, like the explosive, motorik outro on “More Than Love.” Albums have rarely been a vehicle for showing off, they tell me over a slice of pie at Cindy’s in Eagle Rock. “That’s my creative outlet, it’s not a resumé.” Duffy is starting to unlearn that on their new album, Blue Reminder—a deft guitar record full of thought-out solos, like on the title track, the heavy, buttressing strums on “More Today,” and the heavenly, twanging cascade falling across “Quiet Summer.” For the first time ever, a Hand Habits project is a splashy, show-offy spectacle.

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Blue Reminder, which was inspired by, at least partially, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, is Duffy’s fourth or fifth album, depending on your classification of their 2023 release, Sugar the Bruise, a collection of songs gleaned from a song-a-day exercise constructed by Philip Weinrobe. That music felt special—20 minutes of Duffy’s interests stretching into new, experimental pockets, where they sing like a “muppet Frank Sinatra” on “The Gift of the Human Curse,” call upon Ethan Gruska to add color to the filmic, gay-shame piano ballad “Private Life,” and explore drum ‘n’ bass and German synth-pop on “The Bust of Nefertiti”—but Blue Reminder is tremendous and cut open, tracked live by every member of Perfume Genius not named Mike Hadreas (who sang with Duffy on “Just to Hear You” four years ago): Tim Carr, Pat Kelly, Greg Ulhmann, and Alan Wyffels, accompanied by synthesist Benny Bock, the voices of Miya Folick, Olivia Kaplan, Jenn Wasner, and Marina Allen, and members of Uhlmann’s band SML, Los Angeles jazz heroes Josh Johnson and Anna Butterss.

Duffy has played lead guitar in Perfume Genius since the beginning of the decade, around the same time that Carr, Uhlmann, and Kelly joined the band, as well. (Personally, my favorite move of theirs is the opening guitar lick to “On the Floor,” which sounds different each time I hear it, in the same way that Johnny Marr never plays the same “This Charming Man” riff twice.) At the start of their tenure, Duffy was getting ready to release Fun House and needed to tour it, so they were brought along to open all of Perfume Genius’ Set My Heart On Fire Immediately headlining shows. Playing every night was, in Duffy’s words, “a conversation that surprises.” Carr’s drumming, they say, can go off the rails but somehow land on the tracks, while Kelly’s bass lines are vitally melodic yet tacit and subtle. “We had to learn how to play a lot of different kinds of music together,” Duffy says of their bandmates’ introduction to the Perfume Genius catalogue. “You can literally read each other’s minds and predict what they’re going to do, and then you adjust what you’re going to do in response.”

Shortly after Sugar the Bruise, Duffy and Ulhmann released a record together on their own, Doubles. It was a batch of improvised guitar songs—multi-minute compositions built through intuition and instruction. Improvisation isn’t just a major player in Duffy’s process, it’s a happy posture for them to step into. And Uhlmann’s presence has strengthened their pocket, confidently and rhythmically. There’s a sequel to Doubles on the way, an effort that may reveal Duffy’s next direction. “I’ve always joked that Hand Habits will become a jam band at some point,” they laugh. “Give it… five years.”

But every Perfume Genius release since No Shape has been produced by Blake Mills, which means the amount of guitars present on those recordings is virtually impossible for just one player to recreate on stage. So upon joining the band, Duffy and Ulhmann had to do “sectionals” with each other, which Duffy hadn’t attempted since high school. That meant playing through songs at half-speed to get a sense of where their segments would fit. “When we were practing ‘One More Try,’ this beautiful, descending arpeggio going down the neck [of the guitar], which I’m pretty sure Blake just played on one guitar, and we split into two super-slow parts. It was very meditative, and that was where [Doubles] was born out of.”

Duffy and Ulhmann made Doubles at their own pace, throughout a year—getting together once a month and recording across a three-day span. Their next album, however, took only a week to write. “I always have this tendency to think that everyone else knows more than me, or is better than me. And I’m always telling myself that,” Duffy says. “But the thing that I think has helped me with that is I’m really open to learning, and I think I’ve learned how to listen from playing with Greg really intensely. I’ve been in sessions with other musicians where it’s taken a couple of days to compliment one another. I don’t think that he and I are super similar guitar players, but our instincts are similar. It’s like dating: There’s either chemistry or there’s not.”

Wyffels, ever the delegator, has a habit of working on something until it feels right. Duffy gave themselves permission to mirror that attitude on Blue Reminder. “There were parts that I wasn’t happy with, and I think the old me would have been like, ‘This is good enough,’” they say. “I would just let it be not quite what I wanted, out of scarcity. With this record, I wanted to really like it and not make a lot of concessions.” So they took their time writing, trusted the musicians around them, and challenged themselves compositionally, tapping into Hadreas’ “Why can’t it just be pretty?” maxim and chasing a balance of feeling and harmony rather than improvisation. And while some bands’ aesthetics rub off on the records they produce for other people, like how the War on Drugs’ touch is noticably all over Sam Fender and Craig Finn’s new LPs, Blue Reminder does not sound like a Perfume Genius album, because it was filtered through Duffy and no one else.

But with every listen of Blue Reminder comes an image of Duffy that’s more confident and undoubting. It helps that they “didn’t have as many breakdowns while tracking vocals” this time. They went to school for guitar and didn’t sing or write their own songs until they were in their twenties—far later than some of their peers, who grew up loving music and singing along. When they made Wildly Idle by themselves eight years ago, no one suggested they try singing in a lower key, nor did doing so ever occur to them. “I’ve never considered myself a singer,” they admit. “Singing with Mike, I had to do all of his harmony parts. He’s a really amazing singer and he has incredible range, and his voice is immediately recognizable. And I had to learn how to keep up with it, blowing my voice out while trying to sing to ‘Slip Away’ five times in a row.” Blue Reminder marks Duffy’s first record post-transition, and, after their voice changed registers in the middle of making it, they took vocal lessons to embrace the newfound range. If “Concrete & Feathers” teased the vocal brink to which Duffy could push past four years ago, then the emotional deliveries of “More Today” and “Bluebird of Happiness” sound like miraculous obliterations.

Though Duffy has excelled at amplifying song backdrops, where their guitar seemingly multiplies into two or three on compositions faraway from their own, their solo music has acted as a barometer for most of my entire queer adult life. Each record meets me where I need it to, even when it can feel embarrassing to talk and write about queerness. But their songs, which examine relationships and the worth of the changing, confounding, and complicated lives wrapped up within them, feels ever-potent to me, especially now. It’s what makes “Dead Rat” and “Beauty 62” some of Duffy’s most immediate glories, and, if I am to live in a paradox, then let those songs soothe me through the wreckage. Let Hand Habits be my guide. “I always went to music to disappear,” Duffy admits, “so it’s this ironic thing when you start making music that becomes the way in which you see.” Blue Reminder is a countermeasure against the spans of grief and suffering that trans people get so easily pigeonholed into, against the “days lost to crippling fears.” We are not confined to the mess that hurts us.

And I think, because of that, Blue Reminder is going to be an album that means a lot to a certain kind of person—a person who, after transitioning, finds impossible, relentless love. And that’s what these songs are, but quietly so. It’s a challenge, Duffy says, to write a love song—far more difficult than writing about something fucked up. “It’s taken me a long time to feel okay enough, to let myself be known and to need somebody. That has not been comfortable for me, and I’m finally able to admit that I need emotional connection without changing into the version of myself that I think people want me to be.” In Duffy’s language now, “want” and “need” are not contrasts. At 35 years old, repetitions of desire—an “I love you” at dawn; a heart opening beneath the shadow of mercy; an ultimatum of having everything or nothing at all—are their vocabulary of choice, and I am particularly in awe of their attention to not just small gestures and details, but sincerity, as well.

Hope, which is perhaps all too vacant in our violent scrolls and never-ending news breaks, has burrowed into Duffy’s music like treasure. Joy and devastation may sound alike on a Hand Habits record but, in the afterword of an album like Fun House, which offered access into a collision of non-linear grief and the newness of transition, finding happiness and filling our bellies with cake at the end of the world can’t be all that bad. It helps, of course, that Duffy has survived long enough to fall in love and sing about it, long enough to survey a room and find misery bruising the walls without drawing blood. “I want people to see that that’s possible for somebody like me, who has experienced a fair amount of suffering, in a society where people get cast out for being broken,” they say. “The thing that keeps me going is these relationships in my life that have been lasting and have accepted me for the person I am.”

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson wrote, “If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love to you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.” If there’s anything to take home from Blue Reminder, it’s that companionship, Duffy agrees, has become the great antidote to what overwhelms. “So many of my favorite songs are saying, ‘I need you.’”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

Hand Habits: To Need and Be Needed

Meg Duffy spoke with Paste about the challenges of writing love songs, embracing a singing identity for the first time, and making their new solo album, Blue Reminder, with their Perfume Genius bandmates.