Hop Along’s walk has been a slow one, always having the patience to take one step at a time. After almost eleven years of hard work they released their sophomore album, Painted Shut, and finally conquered the hearts of a good amount of people. Frances Quinlan (vocalist/lyricist/guitarist) was kind enough to walk us through Hop Along’s history and help us make more of one of the most interesting releases of 2015.
Hop Along started in 2004 as your solo freak-folk project and then evolved to what we now can hear in Get Disowned and Painted Shut. Are you able to feel today the effects of playing in a project that went through multiple lives?
I guess it was almost in a way… [pause] So, at one point, when the band started to play together, I think we had considered changing our name. I don’t know, maybe we didn’t even consider that, maybe that just wasn’t even a thought to me because when the band started playing, we were playing songs that I had written as Hop Along, Queen Ansleis like a few years earlier when I was still in school, playing by myself, and so we have a demo of songs and I think I had written pretty much all of those while I was in school and then we adapted it to the band. So, we just hang on to the name and then shortened since technically those were still Hop Along songs. But I mean, honestly I think I’m just personally growing up, we’re all getting older and so the goal of that would be to evolve as a person and as an artist. There was never a point in time were we said, “We have to change.” We just all gradually learned how to write together. So, there would be moments were we’re playing and I just feel great that we have this relationship as bandmates and friends to been able to build a sound together. I mean, it took us years to build that sound. I think because it was so gradual I really didn’t feel the changes. I certainly sense a major change in my life just playing with a band. I wasn’t used to that, at all. I was very used to write by myself, playing by myself, so learning to work and collaborate with others was a challenge for me, but certainly a rewarding one.
And it seems that there was never too much pressure. I mean, your first album, 2012’s Get Disowned, was released eight years after the inception of Hop Along.
The only pressure we feel, and I hope we continue to feel, is that the record should be good. We have an understanding with Saddle Creek [record label] that they know that we want to make a strong record… Obviously there’s a budget. [laughs] Now mostly, with this last record too, the pressure was to make a strong record in the time we had in the studio. But we had done weeks, months really, of demoing before that.
Get Disowned was made piece by piece, over the course of two years, at Headroom Studios in North Philadelphia. It seems that the process of making Painted Shut was very different from Get Disowned.
We didn’t make anything the way we make Get Disowned before, and we probably won’t ever again. It was almost a dreamlike two years, when I think about it now. I remember going to my job, taking the train, and then racing back on my bike to the warehouse to get working on the record because we had five days and then we’d have a month until we could get to work on it again. So, there was pressure there too, but it was these like little increments of pressure. I certainly probably went crazy at some point in those two years, but it had some magical moments.
That way of working allows you to process well the information. Did you feel that you were able to process the information as well with this new album?
I think so because Get Disowned there were songs that were written during the making of that record, in the place we were working on. I remember writing “Some Grace” at the kitchen table in the warehouse and I remember us jamming out the title track in the studio. We had so much time on our hands. We came in there I think with six songs that were halfway ready to go. I think it’s very different when you are writing in the studio. With Painted Shut our time was so limited and we had to be ready and we demoed and demoed. We changed songs several times and finally brought them into the studio and they still needed more. Until you’re done there’s million things that you can do and/or change. We just knew that it had to be mixed until mid-December. I mean, at one point I wanted to go back in there and change some things, but I eventually was able to let go and let it be what it was.
“I was very used to write by myself, playing by myself, so learning to work and collaborate with others was a challenge for me, but certainly a rewarding one.”
If I’m not mistaken, the creation of Painted Shut was done in a more collaborative process.
Yeah, it’s the most open I’ve been to outside ideas of shifting songs in terms of their mood, maybe. “I Saw My Twin” was a really collaborative song, I would say, because I remember having kind of a core idea written and then just changing quite a bit… And a lot of them did [change]. A few of them kind of stayed the same as when they first were written down on the acoustic guitar, but most of them changed quite a bit along the way.
Was it easy for you to deal with the fact that some of the songs changed a lot or a little bit?
I have a hard time. The thing I have the hardest time doing… I would say it’s probably getting rid of all verses and stuff when people feel like a song is longer than it needs to be or a line that is unnecessary. I tend to get married to lines, sometimes, and I had to learn to let go of that with this record. Not too many things seem to be easy for me to do. [laughs]
Is there a track that stands out in terms of how challenging it was to write and/or record?
Recording wasn’t really that crazy, I guess, of a challenge… Once we went in it was the most realized I’d ever gone into the studio with songs. I think I always thought, without saying so, that it’s totally natural to just write in the studio. Maybe an entire song, or maybe the other half of a song. I would say that there were just a couple of songs that went through further changes once we got to the studio. We were pretty ready to go, I would say. Writing was a whole other… I mean, writing took a long time. That took two years. It’s funny because people talk about how Painted Shut was recorded a lot more quickly than Get Disowned was, but I think they were both written in about the same amount of time. I remember [for Get Disowned] of being very eager to get in the studio when I really wasn’t ready to, and so we went in the early stage of writing.
It seems that the lyrics on Painted Shut are more self-explanatory than on Get Disowned. Was that a concern when you were writing them?
I remember working on “Powerful Man” and it was the first time I was scared to have lyrics be put out into the world. I mean, I’ve been nervous about my work before, countless times, but Painted Shut was the first time I was nervous for songs to come out because the content was very based in reality… a lot of those songs, almost all of them, really.
Why were you so nervous putting out “Powerful Man”?
Because it’s so personal. It’s an event that happened in my life that I’m not particularly proud in any sense. I don’t feel good recounting the events, but it was very true and I thought it was important to be said. I think that the fact that it was scary made it all the more important.
Did writing about that particular situation made things easier for you, in terms of dealing with those emotions?
No. [laughs] Kind of hoped it would but no. I don’t think… There’s a really great line in my favorite TV show, The Wire, where one of the cops [Det. Lester Freamon played by Clarke Peters] says, “The job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole (…)”. I mean, it doesn’t fixes it. It doesn’t change, it doesn’t resolve anything. That happened and it is still happening to people. I’m glad I wrote it, but I still feel bad about it. [laughs] I don’t think closure exists in some capacities.
What was it that draw your attention to Buddy Bolden and Jackson C. Frank?
Those were two different points in my life that I write about those two people. I read about Buddy Bolden because I was taking this class essentially on death in college. Of course there’s a class on death when you’re in college. It was class about awareness of death and we were all writing papers and I found out about this cemetery in New Orleans called Holt Cemetery, which was essentially for poor people because it was one of the few cemeteries where people were just buried underground because that occurs so much there. I think I have this right, a lot of cemeteries people get buried above ground in like big cement tombs. Buddy Bolden was this monumental musician but there’s no recording of his music. The only indication that we have that he was a musician is other people verifying this, and a lot of those people have died now. It’s just sort of this memory of a memory, I guess. There’s just no evidence and that’s sad, that he wasn’t able to get his work recorded. And he was also plagued by mental illness, I think in his 30s. You think about how bad we are now regarding mental illness… I mean, there’s so many homeless people that are mentally ill on the street and we don’t have the solution for that. But imagine how it was 100 years ago for mentally ill people. We didn’t even know half of the diseases, I think. So, he died in a sanitarium or at an asylum and his sister was too poor to keep with the payments on his grave so what happened was, at some point they dug him up, dug the whole deeper, putting him back and then buried somebody on top of him. And they kept doing that until they lost total track of where he’s even buried. So, Buddy Bolden is this musician who didn’t have the chance of recording his work and nobody knows where his body is. Jackson C. Frank, I was painting a house, listening to Pandora and “Tumble In the Wind” came on and I was absolutely stunned by that song. It was the first time in a long time that I was touched by a song in that way because it was recorded later in his life, I think he had already been homeless. He had almost lost his voice by then, it was just this sad, grasp, really worn down voice. I just thought it was one of the beautiful songs I’ve ever heard. So, I read about him and found out about his mental illness, and being homeless, and just all his bad luck going through life. Somebody shot his eye out by accident while he was sitting on a bench. Some kids were playing with a pellet gun and shot him in the eye. Reading his story was pretty wild and that stuck with me as well and… Finally I wrote songs about those people.
“I didn’t know how I felt about anything for a very long time. I still don’t know in regards to a lot of things: what I want, what I’m looking for, etc.”
Why did you want to talk about mental illness on this record? I mean, mental illness isn’t like death, which is sometimes romanticized and somewhat celebrated in a weird way. Mental illness seems to be a subject that people don’t want to talk about because it’s too uncomfortable.
No, not at all. I mean, it’s terrifying to think that your mind will die. Talking a lot about death, and I think we’re mostly talking about the body dying we’re not talking about ourselves dying. Imagine your body walking around and be technically alive and you, yourself, are gone. You have no memories or your brain is being eaten away. There’s not just an ounce of glamour to that situation. I met someone that was mentally ill when I was about ten or twelve. My stepfather’s childhood friend suffered from schizophrenia and on the weekends he would hang in my parents’ house a lot, and sometimes during the week, because his family was gone and… [pause] I wish I hadn’t been so afraid of him because I was just a kid and I had no idea what to say to somebody that was talking to himself in the kitchen, you know? But I wrote a couple of songs about him later on, after he passed. It was very sad. He actually overheated in his bathtub and I think it was because of the medication he was taking. There’s some medication for people that I guess if you take it a possible side effect is that you won’t know when your body is getting hot. It was a summer day and I believe he turned his fan off because he was afraid that it was going to fall on him from the window, so he wouldn’t use his fan… It was a really hot summer that year and so he just died in his bathtub while trying to cooling his body.
Is the song “Waitress” talking about a specific situation that occurred in your life?
It’s one situation, one specific situation. When I try to explain it… I’m not very good at it and also it just sounds the most high school story you could ever hear. But it basically addresses the idea of a person being defined passively by certain events in their life that are not, at all, proud of. I guess it relates to “Powerful Man” in that sense, in a much lesser capacity. I mean, it wasn’t nearly as serious as the situation of “Powerful Man”. It’s hard to be at work and then you see somebody that you really don’t want to ran into and you’ve hoped to never ran into, but there they are and you just have to keep continuing to work and… be a professional. [laughs]
What did you want to convey with the title Painted Shut?
Well, there had been a few names floating around and Painted Shut came up. Obviously just saying it sounds like two different phrases. It can sound like “paint it shut” or the way it’s written. I like the idea of the past tense, having something that was painted close because in reality paint isn’t strong at all, it comes right off with a blade or something. Something painted shut is easily turned open. And I like the idea of… When you go past an old house that is contained a hundred times, I’ve always like how those look, especially the windows that are painted shut. There’s a line in the song “Sister Cities” that didn’t use to be there, I had it when we were recording the version for the record that says “Red flowers against your painted shut window.” I just had that image in my mind for a long time.
What compelled you to draw a big pile of giant fruit?
Actually my brother Mark [Quinlan, drum] had reminded me about how I was really into these Spanish paintings from a long time ago. These bowls of fruit. You can tell… I mean, I think you can tell that it took the artist weeks or months to paint those paintings so you can imagine the fruit was rotten as it was being painted. I remember looking at these paintings and I felt that I could see the food rotting, these brown not very fresh look to them. And I like the idea of being a bowl of food that nobody can have. There’s something tragic to that, right? Here’s plenty of food that no one can touch. I liked the idea of making a mountain of food and I’ve put the birds to kind of indicate the size.
The accolades, signing with a record label, and the success of Hop Along is getting now in a more advanced and mature period of your life – you’re all around 30 years old. Did you ever stop to think how things would be if you were just 18 or 20?
There’s just no way I could have written what I have written now if I was 18. It takes experience. I think what makes a good writer, usually and typically, is experience. Obviously there are great young writers out there but that’s a rarity. I certainly don’t mind being just about 30 and having a song that I can stand behind, you know? When I was 18 or 19… I felt that I could stand behind those songs and I felt differently about a year later. [laughs] In my experience, I remember being 19 and then being 20 and just feeling worlds different. And that’s been a lot of a more gradual feeling over the years. Going from 18 to 22 was… things were changing daily, constantly, for me. I didn’t know how I felt about anything for a very long time. I still don’t know in regards to a lot of things: what I want, what I’m looking for, etc. But I certainly feel more grounded as a person because of all I’ve been through and I’m glad I was able to find a way to apply that directly in a song. I mean, maybe I won’t be so direct the next time around when I’m writing the lyrics, but I’m proud that was able some of that, some of those experiences. Especially and essentially the harder ones and the less admirable ones.