All the While

Meg Duffy made "All the While" under their Hand Habits moniker, and the song carries all the qualities that distinguish their work from the broader field of indie folk: an unusual approach to song structure that seems to breathe rather than follow verse-chorus logic, and a guitar style rooted in fingerpicking but inflected by jazz and classical technique in ways that feel thoroughly their own. The production is intimate without being lo-fi — you can hear the room, the slight ambient air around the guitar body, the weight of Duffy's voice settling into each syllable. Lyrically, the song meditates on time — the way whole stretches of life pass without our full attention, the retrospective clarity that comes too late. Duffy's vocal delivery has a quality of thinking-out-loud, as though the song is being composed in real time, which makes it feel less like performance and more like confession or conversation. They emerged from a community of Los Angeles musicians connected to producer Brad Cook and a broader network of artists renegotiating what folk music could be in the 21st century. "All the While" is music for reckoning — for sitting with the accumulated weight of choices made and unmade, for driving alone through landscapes that feel like metaphors. It does not console so much as witness, which is its own form of comfort.