For existing fans of Hop Along, their recently released new album, Bark Your Head Off, Dog, is yet another wonderful Indie Rock synthesis of their varied influences and continued evidence of the band’s ongoing brilliant musical and lyrical evolution. For anyone who is just discovering the Philadelphia quartet’s estimable gifts, Hop Along’s third album has them scrambling backward to chart the path the band took to arrive at this impressive juncture.
Singer/songwriter Frances Quinlan has been plying her musical trade for over a decade, beginning in high school under the solo acoustic banner of Hop Along, Queen Ansleis. During her college years, she self-released a handful of demos and after her 2008 graduation, her older brother Mark abandoned his Metal pursuits and set up his kit behind his clearly talented sister. While he agrees that his familial bond with his sister affords him a ringside seat to her incredible work, he doesn’t feel that it gives him a greater insight into how he should approach his contributions to their songs.
“I’m not saying I don’t have a unique take on her songwriting, I just don’t think being her brother gives me an advantage insofar as the actual composition itself,” says Mark Quinlan. “I think what it does lend to though is being very aware of my sister mentally and emotionally and making sure we’re achieving our goals in a constructive manner. Frances is so unique in her songwriting, it’s important to complement those ideas.”
The freshly minted sister/brother duo streamlined their royal nomenclature to become simply Hop Along, and welcomed bassist Tyler Long in 2009, documenting their new working relationship with 2012’s Get Disowned, an album that was championed by Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus and earned the band a contract with Saddle Creek Records. Those sessions were abetted by multi-instrumentalist/producer Joe Reinhart, who eventually became a full-fledged band member in 2013. The full quartet was in place for the recording of 2015’s Painted Shut, and the stage was set for their next developmental step.
Painted Shut represented Hop Along’s first studio experience with an actual producer, renowned boardsman John Agnello. The band was extremely happy with the results of Agnello’s input on the album, but as new material began to emerge, the quartet increasingly felt as though their next album would be better served by an in-house production.
“I think in spending time in the studio and working at our own pace…gave us the freedom and ability to be honest and to properly serve the songs,” Mark says. “We just wanted to have a little more freedom within our own timeline, completely unencumbered by anything else. It was just the band within itself.”
One of the biggest advances came by way of Frances’ growth as a lyricist. Always a confessional writer with an unflinching observational perspective, she began digging even deeper into her emotional core for her words, which challenged the band to raise the bar of their musical compositions. As a result, Bark Your Head Off, Dog is the most sophisticated, expansive and produced album in the Hop Along catalog, featuring tastefully appointed strings for the first time.
“We were just trying to be as honest and as forthright as we could possibly be on this record, really serve the writing itself, and to sound cohesive as the four original members of the band writing the songs,” Mark says. “Every song is unique. Either Frances will come to us with a pretty fleshed-out idea that kind of writes itself or she’ll come to us with something very abstract that needs to be built from the ground up and then reimagined a few times. We did more reimagining of songs from scratch than we’ve ever done before. And I think we always wanted strings on this record. It just felt like it was time for instruments outside of the realm of strictly Indie Rock that we could expand a little more.”
With all four Hop Along members working toward writing together on Bark Your Head Off, Dog, it stands to reason that strategy would naturally lead to the band playing together more effectively in the studio. As Mark notes, the band’s singular sonic profile remains identifiable as Hop Along, but the new album shows they have progressed exponentially over the past three years.
“It was definitely more about playing with each other, rather than trying to make this thing that bucked up against what the others were doing,” he says. “Being that cohesive unit was what we were able to accomplish a little bit better with this record, and I think with every record as we move forward.”
Hop Along has evolved greatly over the past nine years, morphing from Frances’ solo singer/songwriter persona to a sibling guitar/drums duo to an actual band that initially sounded like the sum of its parts and now uses a more integrated, translational approach to its influences. Predictably, the band’s individual influences are diverse but never oppositional, and they converge to create a sound that is uniquely their own.
“We’re all different. Joe naturally is very guitar-forward in his influences, but there’s a lot of things we all agree on,” Mark says. “I think we all like Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and we also all love Songs: Ohia. And I think Frances is more songwriting, as far as her influences. She loves Bill Callahan, most of Mount Eerie’s stuff, Joni Mitchell is a big influence, and Kate Bush. Tyler is a little more heartland vibe with his music; he’s very versatile and his tastes tend to change one way or another. And my thing is lots of Jazz, lots of psychy Indie Rock, something with an interesting beat but not necessarily complicated. The point is we’re relatively eclectic in our tastes.”
Hop Along plays the Ballroom at Taft Theatre on Sunday (July 29). Tickets/more info: tafttheatre.org.
This article appears in Jul 18-25, 2018.