Put on a record by Philadelphia's Hop Along and the first thing you'll likely notice is Frances Quinlan's voice. It's unlike any other — powerful and emotive, but astonishingly close to breaking any second. In the verses of songs like "Happy to See Me" and "Tibetan Pop Stars," Quinlan sings intriguing stories through raspy whispers, but while building to the chorus, in the moments when some singers might try to contain any rough edges, she confidently unleashes a wail, allowing her voice to crackle and waver and hypnotize with its imperfection.
As with other polarizing singers such as Kate Bush or Joanna Newsom (though she sounds like neither), Quinlan's vocals defy comparison and divide listeners into two camps. There are those who love it (and attempt to re-create it, loudly, while driving down the interstate) and those who do not.
If it's too much for you, fine — you can go listen to Michael Bolton. But you'll miss out on Hop Along's less obvious but even more notable gift, an ability to tell a story so intimate it feels like a privilege to hear it.
Like Quinlan's voice, the people and moments that inspire Hop Along's music are not always pretty or perfect. "Powerful Man," the first single from Painted Shut, the band's latest LP (and first for Saddle Creek), is about the complicated feelings Quinlan experienced when she helplessly watched a man beat his young son. "Horseshoe Crabs" was inspired by Jackson C. Frank, a lesser-known musician whose life was plagued by tragedy — an explosion at his elementary school killed several of his classmates and left him with severe burns on half his body, and as an adult he was left blind in one eye after being accidentally shot while sitting on a park bench. He also suffered from schizophrenia, went in and out of institutions and was homeless for a time before eventually moving in with his parents and abandoning music altogether.
"I just heard one of his songs on a Pandora station, and it was a really moving piece called 'Tumble in the Wind,' " Quinlan tells the Scene by phone. The band is on a long tour drive somewhere in New York state. "I looked into his story, and it was one of the saddest things I read in a while."
The harsh reality of mental health is a recurring theme with the band, and, according to Quinlan, an important conversation to have — "Sally II," on the band's 2012 full-length Get Disowned, remembers a man, a family friend, who was also schizophrenic and all but abandoned by his own family.
"People fall through the cracks all the time," Quinlan says. "It's terrible. They become wards of the state, some of them. They're handed over to psychologists. Sometimes they pump them full of pills and send them off.
"We're still learning how to deal with it at all," she continues. "We're still learning to talk about mental illnesses in any capacity. Anxiety, depression — we're still not even really able to acknowledge a lot of things as illnesses. We're behind; we're trying to catch up."
While Get Disowned is packed with found sounds and layered experimentation, a side effect of a loosey-goosey, multi-year recording schedule, Painted Shut required the band to work swiftly, resulting in airtight songs that often lean toward more traditional indie pop. But Quinlan's poetic, careful lyrics and her nontraditional singing elevate Hop Along above the genre's generally bleak landscape. And really, her voice can't be all that divisive — Painted Shut landed on several of last year's notable "Best Of" lists, receiving praise from Vice, The A.V. Club, Stereogum and others.
"My voice is my voice," Quinlan says. "I was born with it. I have to do with it what I can. There's been so many times where I've listened to somebody like Sibylle Baier or Nina Simone and just thought, 'God, I wish I could do something like that.' It's just disastrous to compare yourself to anybody, but I can't seem to help it."
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