Last month, Meg Duffy announced the new Hand Habits album Blue Reminder and released the lead single "Wheel Of Change." Today the singer-songwriter is unveiling two more tracks, "Jasmine Blossoms" and "Dead Rat."
"This song really conjures for me the room and the time that I wrote it in — I was living in Mount Washington in LA, which is just such a beautiful, lush neighborhood," Duffy began about "Jasmine Blossoms." They continued:
And there were (and are) these sort of unthinkable contradictions, between the beauty of the flowers and the trees and the birds around me, and then just being blasted with so much horrifying information and footage of war, death, and greed on the news and social media. This song is definitely not an answer to how to integrate those things, but I just wanted to try to sort of depict that experience, that one reality doesn’t negate the other. I come from a family where we don't typically talk about the tragic or dysfunctional, which I think partly led to me being a songwriter who talks about pain and grief a lot, and at the same time, to being a person who tries to cultivate some joy, while everything falls apart.
Here's what they said about "Dead Rat":
There was an actual dead rat rotting in my wall. It was disgusting and I was living with the smell and couldn't get to it, so there was truly nothing I could do but wait it out. It just became this metaphor for me on a number of levels: There are definitely things that I’ve done or been through that a part of me would rather put behind the wall and never think about again… but that’s not the way the psyche or healing works, and things will find their way out, whether it's through a wretched smell or through acceptance or an open window, or all three.
That's the beautiful thing about art: You can make something beautiful inspired by something as gross and depressing as having a dead rat in your wall. Listen to the tunes below.
Blue Reminder is out 8/22 via Fat Possum.
