Painted Shut Turns 10

Buddy Bolden spent almost half his life looking through sealed windows from inside an insane asylum. Nicknamed "King" in his native New Orleans for his bold, pioneering approach to the cornet, his instrument of choice, Bolden was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1907 at age 30. He died in the asylum 24 years later and was buried in an unmarked grave so plain the exact location of his body is unknown today. Experts now often attribute Bolden’s sharp health decline to pellagra, a vitamin deficiency that disproportionately befell poor Black communities in the early 20th century. There’s very little known about his life, but his legacy lives on by way of a genre Bolden helped invent which didn’t get a name until after his death: jazz.

“I heard you were the king/ You didn't leave behind a goddamn thing,” Frances Quinlan sings in the opening lines of “Buddy In The Parade,” the second track to Hop Along’s sophomore album Painted Shut, which turns 10 years old this Sunday. Quinlan, a visual artist as much as a musical one, first learned of Bolden in a college class at the Maryland Institute College Of Art, not long after they began their freak-folk solo project Hop Along, Queen Ansleis. Raised by audiophile parents alongside two musician brothers, Quinlan initially picked up the guitar as a young teenager, inspired by the sharp tongue of songwriters like Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, and Lauryn Hill. As Hop Along, Queen Ansleis, Quinlan put out one very solid album called Freshman Year in 2005. But there’s only so much you can do as a solo artist, and Quinlan always felt their songwriting was better suited for arrangements they couldn’t possibly perform alone.

Quinlan moved to Philadelphia after college and began performing Hop Along, Queen Ansleis songs at DIY gigs around the city. By 2009, their drummer brother Mark joined the fold to help fulfill their capital-B Band aspirations, as did their bassist friend Tyler Long. Now a trio with a simplified name, Hop Along — a nickname Quinlan earned in high school for their tendency to dilly-daddle -- regularly shared bills with another soon-to-be-beloved crew of Pennsylvania hooligans, the emo revivalists Algernon Cadwallader.

Frontman Peter Helmis and Quinlan would date for a period of time, but Quinlan’s budding friendship with guitarist and producer Joe Reinhart would become especially critical when it came time to record Hop Along’s proper debut, 2012’s Get Disowned. "I had talked to Joe on many occasions, and I really felt like we were on a pretty similar wavelength," Quinlan said at the time of seeking a producer. "I wanted to make sure we also made the record with a friend that understood us. Whenever I hear about people making records with strangers, it just gives me so much anxiety." With the release of Get Disowned coinciding with Algernon's thankfully-not-permanent breakup, Reinhart didn’t just produce Get Disowned. He went ahead and joined Hop Along full time.

Get Disowned didn’t make an immediate splash -- it didn’t get a Pitchfork review until its 2016 reissue -- but that Algernon association and the sheer quality of its songwriting garnered some promising buzz. Famously, Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus would declare its centerpiece "Tibetan Pop Stars" "the most painfully beautiful song ever." The Philly basement punks would gravitate towards its scrappy, rough-around-the-edges charm, while its blend of emo-tinged folk-rock would draw enough comparisons to Bright Eyes and Rilo Kiley that Hop Along would ink a deal with Saddle Creek too. In 2014, they began recording Painted Shut, a comparatively more polished record that would clear a bit of the production fuzz and let each instrument act as its own distinct voice.

And speaking of distinct voices: God damn, does Quinlan have one. They belt with a pack-a-day rasp that somehow never sounds grating and is always on pitch. It’s the very first thing you hear on Painted Shut, isolated in the pick-up notes that introduce album opener “The Knock.” “The witness just wants to talk to you,” they repeat on the chorus, their narrator frustrated — and perhaps radicalized — by the pair of Jehovah's Witnesses rapping at the front door. “Did you see the look on the face of the kid he brought with him?” Quinlan sings, as if with a sigh. "I've never once seen a teenager look so radiant." Painted Shut often finds its characters at these types of moral crossroads, weighed by the burden of simply knowing too much. But as lyrically and vocally strong as "The Knock" is, it's one of numerous cases on the album where it's just as impactful instrumentally; Mary Lattimore’s gorgeous harp flourishes in the bridge give way to a truly epic, headbanging guitar solo.

Quinlan mines real-life memories on songs like the restaurant-set "Waitress," where they detail the only event worse than running into your ex at work: running into your ex's new partner at work. "She must’ve known who I was/ The worst possible version of what I’d done," Quinlan laments between seating tables, as rollicking drums and Reinhart's mathy riffs dance along with the winding vocal melody. "It's not that I am worried/ I just wish you and your friends would leave." Later, on the spectacular, almost funky “Powerful Man,” they recall witnessing a father physically abusing his young child and regretfully being too afraid to intervene. "He said 'She's not gonna help you,'" Quinlan's 18-year-old self confesses, their thought process unfolding in real time. "I just thought he looked like a powerful man." The penultimate track "Well-dressed" is a tearjerking, singalong ballad about navigating the deepest of depressive episodes -- a jarring sonic contrast to the barnburner closer "Sister Cities," where Quinlan remembers the adversities that occurred in their own childhood: "I know you had to shoot that dog I loved so much/ I know you had to do it," go its final lines, a hell of a way to end a record with no shortage of jaw-dropping lyrics.

Like most good things Hop Along, Painted Shut is largely concerned with death. But Quinlan takes a universal approach, less worried about the event of death itself but of the legacies we all leave behind — and the fact that we can’t control our legacies ourselves, no matter how much notoriety is warranted. Nobody is immune to tragedy: not Quinlan, not Buddy Bolden, and certainly not Jackson C. Frank, the late folk legend whose career was curtailed by severe health issues both physical and mental. Quinlan sings from Frank’s point of view on the vivid Americana tune "Horseshoe Crabs": "All I found was myself, lost in time/ I tried singing my songs/ But I lost my mind," they shout on the explosive bridge, with so much conviction you wonder if they feel as though they’re losing their mind themself.

Save for some post-pandemic touring, Hop Along have remained fairly quiet as a group since Painted Shut’s even more streamlined 2018 follow-up Bark Your Head Off, Dog. Since that album, Quinlan released the lovely solo LP Likewise under their own name in 2020, and Reinhart has been playing consistently again with Algernon Cadwallader, who reunited to much fanfare in 2022. Currently, the fate of Hop Along is up in the air; they haven’t officially announced a hiatus, but they haven’t publicly dispelled rumors of a breakup, either. But if Painted Shut makes one thing abundantly clear, it’s that good things shouldn’t last forever -- good songs, however, can last a long time.