witnesses at the Hop Along show
Hop Along played at Brooklyn Steel on Saturday night. They started with “Kids On the Boardwalk” and the energy never waned. They covered Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” The crowd was ecstatic. A couple times between songs—with a measured determination not to take song requests—Quinlan kept saying “I just want it to be perfect.” It came pretty close.
Quinlan’s lyrics whipsaw between the poetic and the petty, the insightful and the insignificant. (And again, you really have to hear it.) Small scenes are offered up for reflection at the same time as they are dismantled or curtailed. In “Waitress,” the second song they played, the narrator watches someone they once wronged walk into the bar where they work. The song tilts toward insight before swerving back to earth:
By the time it’s old
My face will have been seen
And I’ll share a very common poverty
It’s a very common kind
Common kind, common kind
It’s a very common kind
It’s not that I am worried
I just wish you and your friends would leave
Significance springs from ordinary, if odd, events: watching a cartoon, walking into Waffle House, observing a greedy bluejay at the birdfeeder. But hardly any conclusions are made; instead, interaction and observation wind around each other. Phrases are repeated again and again. The songs burst and crackle like passing thoughts, like moments carefully but obliquely rearranged.
It is no surprise that Quinlan is a lifelong keeper of journals. There is a solitary and writerly quality to their lyrics. Quinlan has said that “Even if there is a response in the song, that response is frozen and can’t be dug into any more than a particular phrase. The song is doomed, it can’t be a dialogue — it’s one person singing.”
“The witness just wants to talk to you,” sang Quinlan during the encore, in the refrain of “The Knock.” In the song, the narrator finds themself strangely moved by a Jehovah’s Witness who comes to the door, and enters a dialogue with a skeptical friend or partner: “You said, ‘Why did you get so sentimental over them?’ / I wasn't, it's just, it's been a long time since I was moved to crying.” A frozen dialogue, perhaps. One person’s telling, one person’s song. And yet, played large and loud, the song becomes something else.
In an interview last year, Quinlan remarked that
For a lot of people, there is this desire that existence is not just limited to their body or mind and that’s all: that there is this force or existence, this outer witness. And some of us just want it to be other people, that can prove we were here, the memories of others and the love of others as proof of our having been here.
For that outer witness, the church; for other people, the concert hall. I may not have been moved to crying but I thought the show was moving as hell. I thought it was a relief.
Sometimes I think we write in order to ennoble our lives with something they do not, will not, will never have. That the writer crouches between his life and the telling of it. I do not think this is true of music. For where was that space on Saturday? One person singing was five people playing was hundreds of people moving their bodies while a voice pitched and coiled around a phrase: The witness just wants to talk to you. Spectacle breaks open the solitude of any song.
—
After the show, hungover in the morning, the cool feels good. There is scattered rain on the walk to coffee. My friend Henry says he wishes it were colder. I run home from the subway station in a downpour, past the men who wait for the bus or for nothing.
The afternoon rain makes things in the City seem quieter and farther apart. But my head is the opposite, still stuck in the concert hall, in the witnessing. It roars with the closeness between things.
ben tapeworm