Video: Hand Habits, ‘Can’t Calm Down’

Kevin Bronson on January 25th, 2019

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Meg Duffy emerged from the shadows of being a side player in 2017 with the first album as Hand Habits, “Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void).” The music was enveloping like slow-moving coastal fog; the plaintive lyrics seemed to come not from the singer but from the listener’s own inner voice. That makes sense, you thought, song after song.

Hand Habits returns on March 1 with “Placeholder,” the singer-songwriter’s first album for Saddle Creek Records. On the first two singles, the native of upstate New York and member of Kevin Morby’s backing band sounds incrementally bolder and more incisive, holding forth on matters of the heart (the title track) and mind (“Can’t Calm Down”) over luxuriant arrangements. “It’s less of a submerged landscape and more a concise series of thoughts,” Duffy says of the album.

The languid title track puzzles over who might be at fault after a relationship sours — “I was just a placeholder/ With nothing to stand for,” Duffy sings. “Can’t Calm Down,” which features backing vocals from Elizabeth Power of Land of Talk, wonders whether certain feelings are learned behavior or part of our DNA. “What can one do with rage? With pain? With sadness?” Duffy says. “And is it possible to learn how to wipe away completely the knee-jerk reactions to situations that are buried deep in one’s DNA? And the role models that taught us how to behave, whether directly or residually, are they the ones who should be held responsible or is memory partially to blame?”

In director Vanessa Haddad’s video for the song, Duffy goes on a long, bloody walk into the night to give those questions some thought.

||| Watch: The video for “Can’t Calm Down”