Frances Quinlan // Hop Along
“I love to be able to step outside myself. I'm so mired in my own head that it's great when I am suddenly carried off by something new and surprising. That's when I do my best writing.”
Ritual is important to Frances Quinlan of Hop Along, but as it is with many artists, her favorite moments of inspiration are borne out of unpredictability.
There’s a certain comfort that ritual provides to the artist: the predictability offers confidence, the idea that I’ll be able to write this song so long as this part of the process stays the same. Rituals give us confidence because we know that they’ve given us success before. Frances Quinlan has her rituals, but they change once they’re no longer useful. She used to find the coffee shop productive, but now it’s a cup of tea at her admittedly cluttered table. Her day often begins with cereal—it has to be Oatmeal Squares—and reading with soft piano music in the background. And when it comes time to write, it has to be in deep black ink on off-white and slightly rough paper.
Quinlan has a hard time calling what she does “work,” though. Her father worked in a tool and die factory and her mother, a visual artist, was also a house painter. “I've given myself to writing music, but I still have a hard time with that word work or labor,” she told me. “There’s something strange thinking of those words because to me that still means doing something where you come home at the end of the day and are physically beat.”
One of Quinlan’s biggest recent inspirations is Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Quinlan was raised on a steady diet of male writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck. Woolf made her realize the lack of depth of most female characters in the American canon. “I realize now how poorly a lot of my favorite authors wrote women. With writers like Salinger, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, the male characters were complex and complicated. I loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but all the men in the asylum had depth and range, and the women didn't. I feel robbed because I read from the male perspective for so long. Virginia Woolf is so truthful about the experience of being a woman.”
Quinlan’s solo album Likewise is out now on Saddle Creek Records. It’s her first solo album, and she’s learning that “it can be a lonely occupation to be the sole lyricist. The words are not going to be as important to anyone else as they are to me.” Read my interview with Quinlan about her creative process after the video for “Rare Thing.”
I know you’ve always been a visual artist too, so how much of that is still a part of your life?
A
I was a painter and aspiring creative writer before I was a dedicated songwriter. I went to the Maryland Institute College of Art for painting with a minor in writing. I lived in Baltimore after graduating, but once I moved back to Philadelphia, the band that my brother Mark [also of Hop Along] was in was just breaking up. I had wanted to be in a band for quite some time; I wanted that energy on stage that I envied in other bands. It was something I was very enamored with, so we started playing together. I moved into his basement in South Philly. It just made sense at the time. It was supposed to be a pit stop, but I just stuck around.
I've always wanted to keep visual art as part of my life. I'm a very visual person. There's an oil painting that I've been working on for a while but haven't touched it in many months. It's an on and off thing, so I want to be careful when I say I've been working on it for over 10 years now,. Laughs.
Is oil painting something that you try to set aside time to do?
A
My visual art process has its own life. I've been painting longer that I've been a musician, but now it’s a break from my career-driven work. I’ve done the artwork and album covers for Hop Along and used to design all of the merch, but this last album was the first time we approached outside artists to do a visual. I identify so strongly with the visual art part of me, and I felt strange for a long time letting go of that. I was very possessive of the band's visual identity and hung on with my claws dug in for quite some time.
Do you try to write every day?
A
I’ll be honest: I've fallen off a bit in the past year. But I try to be committed to writing every day, and I have a shelf of journals from the last decade, which is great to have when you're running out of ideas. There's a whole well of lines that never made it into anything, so it's great to go back to those journals. Annie Dillard in her book On Writing talks about falling in love with your lines and how dangerous that is. The great thing about a journal filled with lines is that just because it doesn't work with one song doesn't mean it won't work with another.
Why is it dangerous to fall in love with your lines?
A
You have to be careful not to become too enamored with your own work. That just makes the editing process too difficult, which I can appreciate. I used to hate that side of things. I always used to think that the original idea should be the final work. But being in Hop Along, I now see how editing is such a huge part of the process.
I certainly get what they call demoitis. You become too enamored with the first version because it's always easiest to compare everything after with that version. But the lucky thing is that in Hop Along. I work with other people who will change the song dramatically. And what they add makes me realize just how much better the song is. There's nothing but improvements from those kinds of revisions.
No one in our band is going to tell people what they need to play. For example, so much of what drives our song “Tibetan Pop Stars” is the beat, and Mark came up with it. I mean, we'll talk about the mood of the song and that'll drive the style. But as far as exact parts? I think that's one of the reasons we've held together: we each have room to create.
“You have to be careful not to become too enamored with your own work. That just makes the editing process too difficult, which I can appreciate. I used to hate that side of things. I always used to think that the original idea should be the final work. But being in Hop Along, I now see how editing is such a huge part of the process.”
So you’re ok now with the final product being so different from its original form?
A
It's challenging, I admit. I've certainly had to compromise. It can be a lonely occupation to be the sole lyricist in a band. The words are not going to be as important to anyone else as they are to you, up until the point of release. I would often in the past sacrifice the song for the sake of the line. I don't have any regrets about it. When I think of people like Nick Drake or Nina Simone or Bill Callahan, their voices are so beautiful. They can sing the back of a cereal box.
But my voice is limited, and I remember reading an interview with Kate Bush where she says she feels limited by her voice too. My voice has some character, but it can get in the way. I think I thought of myself as being some kind of purist for a long time. But I've come to realize that it all has to work together for it to be great. If you're ignoring the musicality, you're going to be dragging the song along. It may as well be a poem
I’d like to get back to the journaling. Are you doing it just for the songwriting?
A
It's got a lot to do with it, but I also sketch there too. I buy journals that are way too thick, then a year goes by and I still have it and I'm sick of it, so I destroy it even though it's not full. I try to paint on tour since we spend so much time in the van. A few years ago I started doing little van paintings. My friend had gotten me a traveling watercolor set and postcards. So I'd paint the watercolors and sketch in my journal. As far as the writing, they don't have to be related to songs, but someday I'd like to write something separate from songs.
I love fiction, but I've gotten into a lot of memoirs lately. The book that recently blew my mind is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. It's become one of my favorites.. I never thought I'd be into her because I attached all of this persona to that name and I assumed it was too cerebral. But it's fantastic. I also got into Carl Ove Knausgaard. One of his books really influenced the lyrics for Bark Your Head Off, Dog.
For a long time I was on a Cormac McCarthy kick, but I fell off him the last couple of years.
That’s quite a leap from McCarthy to Woolf.
A
I don't know that it would have appealed to me when I was younger. Do you ever just pick up a book, and it's eerie how it appears to be addressing the moment you're living in? I blame Ernest Hemingway. For many years I was following his hard line rules about brevity and never telling anyone what his characters are thinking. I enjoyed Pride and Prejudice, but I wished Jane Austen wouldn't tell me all the time what everyone is thinking. Looking back, though, it didn't hurt the book, and I enjoyed it. Until I read To the Lighthouse, I didn't realize how long I carried these imaginary constructs of what an author has to be. If I had to read Hemingway all the time, I think I'd be a pretty mean person. And I certainly wouldn't understand women at all.
I realize now how poorly a lot of my favorite authors wrote women. With writers like Salinger, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, the male characters were complex and complicated. But the women were either beautiful and mean, or they were angels but carried the world. I loved One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but all the men in the asylum had depth and range, and the women didn't.
I must say that I feel robbed because I read from the male perspective for so long. For a long time, women were pitted against one another and we were taught that they're not meant to be friends. Virginia Woolf is so truthful about the experience of being a woman. There's this one line where the husband keeps commanding sympathy, and it just hit me: I do identify with that characteristic where people don't even realize what they ask of one another day to day. She digs so deep into domestic life. For the longest time, I had trouble with “quieter” books. I thought I had a short attention span and needed dialogue and action and big things to be going on. But that’s not true.
Let’s talk about your songwriting process. How important is the idea of ritual?
A
I seem to have this self sabotaging streak. Both my mom and my stepfather did physical labor: my stepdad worked at a tool and die factory while my mom, who's also a visual artist, was a house painter. She’d wake around 5:30am, so there's this part of me that thinks that if I wake up after 9am, I've lost part of the day because by that time, my parents had already been up for hours working.
Unless there's a deadline, I prefer working in the daylight. Certainly great ideas have come at night, but I love mornings; those private hours are so nice to have when you're not reading emails. That's all changing, though. My attention span was never great, but things come in fits and starts now.
I have a very slow process. No one will ever call me quick or efficient. Now that I've hit my 30s, it's hard to deny patterns and habits. They start to stare you in the face. After 6pm my attention span is definitely a little worse for wear, so I do try to come at things as early as I can.
I'm learning more and more how my rules have not worked. A lot of work has come despite the rules I've set for myself. Some of the best Hop Along songs were because of compromises I had to make. I think I'm always changing. The one thing about my process is that I've never been able to write a song in five minutes or fifteen minutes, like some people say then can. My problem is that I'm always comparing myself to other artists. I went to an art museum recently and kept calculating the ages of all the painters compared to mine. Like look how old THAT person was when they painted that, and they were younger than I am now! Laughs.
Are you a disciplined writer?
A
I envy discipline. I wish I could tell you that I sit for hours. That was part of the Annie Dillard book too, but she talks a lot about all the time spent not writing, just sitting there. I've given myself to writing music, but I still have a hard time with that word work or labor. There’s something strange thinking of those words because to me that still means doing something where you come home at the end of the day and are physically beat.
Songs take so long for me, so I would be horrified to try to quantify my career. But it’s still hard to think of work and not attempt to qualify it by quantifying it. I mean, my writing process is taking place when I'm not writing, but that can be hard to accept. When I think of discipline, I think of people who wake up at 6am every day and start to paint. And I can't say that because I wake up and putz around each morning. The humbling part of the process is that you can spend all your time sitting in a chair trying to come up with words that mean the world to you, and nothing happens. And then something will occur in seconds in the most random places.
How important is environment to your writing process? Are there certain places where you like to write, or certain things you like to have with you when you write?
A
I'm a major creature of habit. It's just so much of my habit has nothing to do with writing. I've gotten really into sitting down with tea at my kitchen table. I'm at it all the time, but it’s all cluttered with books and things that make it so hard to work. I'm just not a responsible organizer.
I do love the idea of ritual. There was a time when I would go every day to the coffee shop to write something. But I've learned from the coffee shop that it's hard to go there and not see people. It’s around the corner, and the blessing and curse is that I constantly see people I know. It’s lovely but distracting. It’s a balance: I like to see people and be social, but that takes away from creative time. So I stopped going every day, because it wasn’t productive.
For now, I like to wake up as early as I can and read with cereal. I've gone back to how I was when I was a kid. Breakfast is the best time for solitude, and I love that time.
I have to ask: what’s your preferred cereal?
A
Oatmeal Squares for sure! And I love listening to solo piano in the morning. I’m really into jazz artists like Oscar Peterson; Pastel Moods is a great album. I love John Fahey too. Both of those artists are fantastic in the morning.
And now for the part of the ritual that I find songwriters to be most possessive about: paper or computer for your lyrics? And if it’s pen and paper, do you have a favorite?
A
Yeah, I'm pen and paper for the first thought then a computer for the final thought. I love writing things down. It's sort of like a painting that you can see. Sure, you can see the process developing when you type, but if you’re typing and delete something because you think it’s no good, you’ll never get it back if you need it later. What I like to do is type up some ideas and then hit return a bunch of times until I get to the next page. I have a problem with deleting. I guess that makes me a word hoarder. Laughs.
I like Micron pens. I was using Le Pen too, but I do like my Microns. I love their rich black, and they are great for drawing. Black is just so gratifying, especially when it's on off white pages, It gives everything that aged look. It's really hard to write on a pure white page and not have it look ugly. I have pretty ugly handwriting, and most people would agree I have kind of a teenage boy. I also need my paper to be a little thick and a little rough. I don't like anything that's too smooth. I have a hard time with it. It makes handwriting look ugly so fast.
Is there an ideal emotion when you get your best writing done?
A
I do wish that no good writing came out of frustration and dark spaces. We need to let go of this idea that you need to suffer in order to create art. That’s not healthy. And I feel so bad for all the artists who created great art that we now realize were suffering from intense mental illness.
But to answer your question: it can come from anywhere. I find it's more and more rare that I am able to sit in an environment that I created. That's the funny thing about writing: you're creating a problem out of nothing that you then have to solve. It's really hard to just stick with it and find a clearing. Basically, you start out with this initial burst, and then suddenly you're just entangled.
There's a passage in To the Lighthouse where Virginia Woolf talks about painting, how it's almost embarrassing when you first put down an idea or or a visual, and it's nothing like what you thought it would look like. That happens when I'm trying to write a song about a certain subject: I immediately feel weighed down. But when they do, they come out right away. For example, I was listening to this great podcast about World War One called Hardcore History. I listened to it, went straight to the library, then wrote "One That Suits Me." I love to be able to step outside myself. I'm so mired in my own head that it's great when I am suddenly carried off by something new and surprising. That's when I do my best writing.
Does one song stand out as being the quickest one to write?
A
"How You Got Your Limp" was pretty fast. I had been thinking about this group of teachers that would come into the bar where I worked. And it was so obnoxious because of them would just shit talk his kids so bad. I really didn't like what he was doing. He would get wasted and eventually have to be put into a cab. He was the oldest one, the most experienced teacher of the group. Then I heard another story about the system being so rigged against young people, which is not a new subject by any means, and both of those ideas came together for the song.
When things are so visual, I do get carried, very quickly. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 is one of my favorite albums. I couldn't tell you what any of those songs mean, but I can tell you everything about the images he writes about.
Jim James told me something similar to what you said about suffering. He wants to get rid of the “tortured artist” myth, that idea that suffering is a necessary part of the creative process.
A
The problem is that suffering is a part of life. Everyone suffers, not just artists. But the idea of “routine” in art is so drab, so it seems like some people created rituals in that routine to spice it up. And people became enamored with that idea, like you have to have a few drinks when you write. Listen, I could never write and drink. I have a few drinks, and I’m asleep. But there’s something faulty in the thinking that pain has to do with a deficiency in yourself.
In no way do I believe that pain and suffering should be romanticized. I think that when people do this, they self-impose pain. It’s aimless, and they lose a sense of their value beyond torturing themselves for the sake of some kind of label that says I’m an artist, and in order to be a credible and celebrated one I will have to suffer. I agree with Jim wholeheartedly that we should value ourselves and take as good of care as we can of our physical and mental health, whatever our profession. But pain is inevitably part of the human experience and I think there is a lot to be learned from it, perhaps as much as there is from joy.