Frances Quinlan
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH SADIE DUPUIS
⤏ PHOTOS BY LILI PEPER | MAKE-UP BY KATIE MANN | STYLING BY LINDSEY HARTMAN
⤏ ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JUNE 2019
After first hearing Hop Along on MIT’s radio station in 2012, I fanmailed Frances Quinlan. Subject line: “SO GOOD.” It’s hard to sum them up any other way. When I moved down to Philly four years later, Frances and I finally met face-to-face over coffee, days before embarking on a U.S. tour together. Speedy Ortiz doesn’t usually take co-headlines unless we’re already BFFLs with the band. But I had a strangely assured optimism, and so wasn’t surprised that Frances and cadre were all kind, thoughtful, fun, and, duh, SO GOOD.
SADIE: I’ve come to see you spin before, and I’m curious about your career as a DJ.
FRANCES: It all happened through [Philadelphia music venue] Johnny Brenda’s. I’ve been working there since 2013 and my friend Nicky [Devine] was there as a showrunner and promoter. We started DJing together under the name “Samesies.”
S: Do you collect vinyl on tour? Are you looking for records to play for DJing, or is it more that you play what you love from a personal collection?
F: That’s the difficulty with touring, right? Maybe you’re at a cool record store and then you think, how is this going to make it in the van and not totally warp or get stepped on? I get nervous about buying vinyl on the road just because you gotta make sure it gets back.
S: Are there other things that you collect?
F: I always start looking for journals, but I fill those up. Nothing ever really stays that nice when it gets into my hands. I have to stop borrowing books from people because I carry them everywhere and they get beat up in my bag.
S: What about art? Do you buy art from your friends, or collect other people’s art? Or are you mostly producing your own?
F: That was one thing I really wish I had collected from people I went to school with. This one woman I went to [Maryland Institute College of Art] with, Hillery Sproatt, makes these beautiful blankets now, and I bought one for my niece. And a woman I shared a studio with my senior year of college, Leyla Rzayeva, is a painter and printmaker. I just saw her in San Francisco. I definitely want to get some of her work.
S: As an artist, do you draw on your community for inspiration, or is your motivation more internal?
F: It’s definitely outward. As a visual artist, there are local artists I’m really inspired by. Cat Park [of Amanda X and Tact] is fantastic. And Dan Hughes is making great work as a printmaker and artist. I also like to follow people that I went to school with in Baltimore. They’re all over the place now; there’s a few in Chicago, not too many move to Philly, some spread out a little bit to the west coast. So it’s nice, I can follow a lot of communities. I’m not that well connected to the art world and it’s nice because the other people that are still working as visual artists inform me about work I should look at. So I try to be receptive. I was really, really in my head all the time and I certainly have that tendency, but I try to open myself more to other stimuli cause you get kind of bored with yourself.
S: We have similar backgrounds in that we both went to art school. I mean, I did an MFA for poetry, but because of so much touring and music, I felt alienated from poetry, like I didn’t have a finger on the pulse anymore. I published a book last year and it’s been great to tour on poetry and reconnect with that world.
Do you get to work on art apart from Hop Along? I know you did the Field Mouse album art.
F: I do all the album art for Hop Along, too. But I just don’t get approached for artwork. I’m still working on myself as a designer. When we were out in Portland, I got a book on letter pressing and typography to get better with my fonts. It’s taking a minute. Being a painter, I never properly appreciated graphic design, the merits of that kind of knowledge. I’m a late starter on that.
S: But it’s all related. It’s cool that you’re continuing to learn so many years after art school. Some people finish it and are like, cool, I’m done. You’re an oil painter primarily, right?
F: I was throughout school. I had a large oil painting I was working with on and off for a very long time. I haven’t worked in that medium as much over the last decade. I moved to watercolor because that was something I could actually do on the road. And I started getting into acrylic painting, which was never my thing in school. I was always oil on wood, like a lot of the old masters, and wanting to somehow put a spin on that. That was really satisfying to me then.
“One of the great fears is not changing at all, for me.”
S: My mom is an oil painter. That’s her main gig. Watching her work, there’s so much patience required, and built into that medium is a lot of time for reflection while you’re thinking of what to do next. I could see there being a correlation between working in oil and the way your songs seem to build up and then deconstruct.
F: There’s a lot of editing and moving things around. I was going through old journals the other day to see if there were any good lines that I didn’t get to work with. There is this nice well of entries that I’ve been looking over, maybe an old line will find its way into a song. Words, uh, they’re really frustrating! [Laughs] I have a hard time working with them. You have an idea and then you have to use language to serve that idea. And yet it’s language that has its own limits. Especially as I get older, I’m so used to certain manners of speech, and I’ll catch myself [being redundant]. Like horses. Horses keep showing up. I’m like, enough with the horses! I’m not even around horses. Why do I want to refer to that?
S: You’re hoping they’ll drag you away.
F: [Laughs] I did like them.
S: Are there parts of creating music or making art that feel like a grind to you?
F: Yeah! When we were working on Painted Shut, towards the end, [producer] John Agnello walked up to me and said, “I hope, I really hope, you have fun doing this someday, making records.” I really get so wrapped up. I get to these moments where I’m like, this could be good if I can just not get in my own way. Or if I could be better. Taking things so seriously certainly has its drawbacks. It can hurt the work, and it’s a funny line to walk. I don’t have it figured out.
S: It almost feels like when you’re recording, you’re occupying two roles, where on one side you’re the creator, and on the other side you’re viewing yourself out of body, as a tool to your own creation. That sounds stressful.
F: Finishing something too, right? My favorite part about making a song is writing. You go into the studio, and you’re finishing it, and you’re saying, this is what I meant. This is what we meant. It has to be the best version of that. You’re in the moment, and then past the moment so quickly.
S: Are there rituals that you take part in for your health or your headspace or just happiness in general?
F: Well, I know, we both like to run.
S: Yeah! Talk to me about it.
F: I went today! I’m getting back into it. I really fell off and haven’t done it in awhile. I didn’t get into running until after college. I ran a marathon in 2010 and that was it. I was like, you don’t need to do that anymore. But I like to do the [ten-mile] Broad Street run.
S: I was supposed to run my first marathon on Sunday.
F: You got sick though, right?
S: Yeah, I’ve had the flu for the past week. I’m sure you can relate to this, but I really hate to cancel anything for sickness. I’ve gone through tours when I had vocal cord nodules and pneumonia and I really shouldn’t have, but I just hate to cancel. So I was like, I’m going to show up at the starting line and see what happens. And I got halfway through the marathon. And then I had to go to the medic tent [laughs].
F: Oh no. But good for you, man. That’s amazing.
S: Are you able to run on tour? For me, one of the reasons I got back into running is because tour often feels so dehumanizing that I need a reminder that I’m in a body. Running is my only way of tapping back into that other than sitting in a van with a book for eight hours a day.
F: Yeah, absolutely. That’s part of why I’m painting. Otherwise I realize I’ve been on my phone for hours and feel mentally depleted and not switched on. I mean, we waste time at home, but on the road you’re basically sitting in a tiny room for how many hours? It’s hard. When we do support tours it’s easier. You get there and you load and then you have some time to kill. And so I’d be able to run. But on the headlining tours, it’s been harder to eke out that time.
S: You have to wake up so early in the morning to make it happen.
F: And I just pick sleep. I need sleep. Especially for my voice.
S: Are there other things you do if not running to steel yourself for performance?
F: You know, it’s so boring. Water. Sleeping. Vocal warmups. Trying to talk less in the morning. But it’s hard, you wanna chat. For a short string of shows, I totally lost my voice after the first one. I was so stressed out, I was like, “I can’t talk until three o’clock tomorrow.” You’d think, easy! But unless you’re asleep, there are just so many things—
S: I find it impossible. Someone will say something that seems slightly wrong and I just want to jump in and correct them. They’re like, you’re supposed to be on vocal rest. I’m like, but you need to know that you’re wrong.
F: [Laughing] I’ll be chipping in like, “But I have something to add!” You get in that rhythm of speech where you know what everyone’s going to be talking about.
S: When you travel with people that much it becomes a family dynamic. Well, for you and Mark [Quinlan, Hop Along drummer and Frances’ brother], literally it’s a family dynamic. But the patterns of speech are so natural, because you’ve toured with the same people for years and years.
F: Tyler [Long, bassist] just hit the ten year marker in the band. Joe’s coming up. Pretty wild.
“I would love to be able to go where other people seem to.”
S: Speaking of family, I wanted to ask you about becoming an aunt.
F: I just babysat Ruby the other night. She turned two in February. She’s the first kid I met the moment she was born and whose life I’m really a part of. [Mark and Courtney, Ruby’s parents] don’t live far, so I can see them every couple of weeks. She’s such a hoot. The other night I was trying to reason with her to go to sleep. I was like, okay, let’s talk about what you’re going to dream about. I was trying to make sleep seem interesting, but I just bored her into sleepiness, which also works.
S: Does it bring up anything for you with your feminist consciousness? Are there things you want for her?
F: Yeah! I’m really excited for her. Her mother is a pediatrician; a powerhouse doctor mom. So that’s amazing. I have a powerful mother, too, as far as emotional strength. Right now I’m really fascinated watching her become a person. It’s completely new to me to watch a child grow up. I’m kind of wrapped up in the experience of her being here. She’s so different from me. I’m so timid and fearful, and she’s really social and walks right up to people wants to try everything.
S: I’ve started to see more and more articles about parents who tour, especially mothers. It must be so cool to be in a band with your brother, for him to have this amazing experience of becoming a parent, and you get to be part of the immediate network that is Ruby’s life. It must be a nice complement to touring so much of the year, which for me often feels surreal and removed somewhat from normalcy. To have a baby in your life is a tether back to humanity.
F: I never really thought about what I was agreeing to do with my time in becoming a touring musician. I didn’t think, all right, these pockets of the year, I’m going to be gone every day. It’s so easy to be unhealthy, waking up in different places everyday and never really getting a hold on anything. I’m a creature of habit, I love my routines. And you’re not allowed that on tour. You’re forced into this particular routine, and you have to negotiate everything else around that. And that’s not to complain at all. I can’t believe we get to do what we do. But I’m certainly thinking more about how to be able to incorporate normalcy into that life, instead of saying, oh, normalcy is going to be on hold for the summer.
S: You’ve been touring for probably 15 years, right?
F: Close. The touring I did from age 19 to 23 was pretty sporadic, just on winter break. It was more like a trip, and it was so novel to me and so different from what it is now. And what it is now is so different from what it was three years ago. It’s not something I ever realized would evolve quite as much as it has.
S: I mean, you’re changing too. You’re in your early thirties now. Have there been adaptations that you’ve been able to make that provide that sense of regularity for you?
F: Painting really helps me, I think. There are certainly still holes in the day. There was a period where I was really into journaling every day. It’s more like every other day at this point, I get so wrapped up in other things. The older I get, the more I write something down and think, didn’t I say that three years ago? One of the great fears is not changing at all, for me. And so going back over old journals I can consistently say, oh, I still have that anxiety. Because you know, anxiety just stays.
S: But it must be cool to be able to follow those patterns across what’s now a substantial body of work. Kind of like what you were saying before, the feeling that you keep using the same word or theme, but maybe there’s a reason for that. It’s probably an interesting thread for people who are looking at it from the outside.
F: Sometimes it gets so humbling, in a frightening way, on the inside. Am I limited to these kinds of narratives? I listen to other albums and am so enthralled by where other people can go, and I think I would love to be able to go where other people seem to.
S: But we’re all listening to your album and thinking the same thing.
F: [Laughs] That’s the thing, I really gotta learn to not feel bad, guessing at what other people are thinking.
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⤏ SADIE DUPUIS (SHE/HER) IS A POET AND MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST. SHE IS THE GUITARIST, LEAD VOCALIST, AND LYRICIST FOR THE BAND SPEEDY ORTIZ. IN 2016, SHE RELEASED A SOLO ALBUM, SLUGGER, UNDER THE NAME SAD13. IN 2018, SHE RELEASED A BOOK OF POETRY, MOUTHGUARD.