A wince warps Meg Duffy's smile as she recalls her first release as Hand Habits: 2012's Small Shifts, a ten-inch split with Peg, the Long Beach-based solo endeavor of Avi Buffalo's Sheridan Riley. Duffy, now 26, recalls her still-maturing vocals and genuine but unsubtle lyrics detailing unrequited love—the kind that seem surreal years later, when other loves have come and gone in between. "We are the same / I want to be your man, but I can't," Duffy sings on "Be Yr Man," packing a set of complex realizations about love and identity into five minutes of acoustic elegance. Though her admission feels distant to her now, it continues to hold significance for those who can't yet say the same.
"Even though I don't play those songs anymore and can't really listen to them because, you know, I judge it, people still write me and say like, this song changed my life, it's so important to me, or, I'm going through a weird sexual identity thing and it's helping me," Duffy says. "So it will stay in the world."
Following Small Shifts, Duffy placed Hand Habits on hold to pursue opportunities playing guitar with Mega Bog and Kevin Morby. Amongst a full band, Duffy stands tethered to her instrument by a desire to understand it from every angle. It's a marked contrast to Hand Habits, through which Duffy carves out space for more personal expression, both instrumentally and lyrically. But that space is also familiar, with her reflections on company and isolation as equally suffocating entities giving the impression that we've laid our heads here before.
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