Hop Along / Bark Your Head Off, Dog / 2018
Prior Things
disoriented, aching, quietly self-lacerating
A hallucinatory, almost disoriented love song in which the narrator watches someone they want but can't quite reach, and talks themselves through the humiliation of being a placeholder rather than a partner. Frances Quinlan builds the song out of fragments—an opening image of insects, a bird feeder, a repeated question about trying—that circle a single wound: the fear of being temporary in someone else's life.
unrequited desire self-deception and rationalization impermanence vulnerability vs. self-protection watching versus acting
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator addresses someone they're infatuated with but who remains distant and largely unaware of the narrator's inner monologue; the narrator is unreliable in the sense that their self-talk visibly contradicts their eventual admission that they were never truly in contention for this person's affection.
What happens
The song opens on a disorienting, almost drugged sensory image, then shifts into observation: the narrator notices someone reading alone, framed as being on 'vacation,' which they associate with erasure and release from the past. From there the narrator rehearses, almost like a pep talk, reasons to pursue this person, but the questions curdle into self-doubt about their own capacity to act. The focus drifts outward to a bird feeder and a bullying jay, a small domestic scene that mirrors the narrator's sense of being crowded out. By the end, the narrator admits the truth beneath all the rehearsal: they were never meant to keep this person, only to occupy the space until someone else arrived.
How it's built
The song is built less on conventional verse-chorus logic than on obsessive returns—particular phrases ('why don't I try,' 'you go,' 'little lower road') recur and mutate slightly each time, as if the narrator is stuck re-litigating the same thought. The ending dissolves into pure repetition of a single phrase, structurally enacting the narrator's resignation and the song's theme of being stuck in place while someone else moves on.
Section by section
Opening image
“buzzing flies were all over me”
The song begins with a disturbing, almost hallucinatory bodily sensation that has no clear narrative explanation. This sets a tone of instability and discomfort before any relational content appears, suggesting the narrator's perception is already unreliable or altered.
Vacation / obliteration
“obliterate all prior things”
The narrator latches onto the word 'vacation' and spins it into a fantasy of total erasure—of the other person's past, and implicitly of whatever stands between them. This moment gives the song its title and frames the narrator's hope that history (including whoever this person was with before) can simply be wiped clean.
First 'why don't I try' sequence
The questioning structure mimics someone talking themselves into courage, but the self-interrogation about imagination and crime suggests the narrator already suspects their own passivity is the real obstacle, not external circumstance.
Bird feeder interlude
The shift to a quiet domestic scene with a dominating jay works as a displaced self-portrait: the narrator identifies with the lesser bird being crowded out, projecting their romantic defeat onto nature without directly naming it.
Final repetitions
“only holding your place on this”
The admission that the narrator was merely a placeholder reframes everything before it—the attempts, the questions, the hope—as rehearsal for a role that was never going to be permanent. The song ends by dissolving into the road phrase repeated like a resigned chant, enacting the stasis it describes.
Craft
- repetition/incantation
- Phrases like the 'why don't I try' questions and the closing 'little lower road' line are repeated with small variations, turning the song into something like a mantra the narrator uses to manage anxiety and eventually accept defeat.
- extended metaphor
- The 'road' image—especially the 'lower road' and 'resuming' it—figures the narrator's life as a secondary, less-traveled path, distinct from the one the desired person is on, encoding their sense of inferiority or self-abnegation.
- disjunctive imagery
- The opening image of flies and the later bird feeder scene don't connect logically to the love-plot; they function as intrusive, almost surreal details that destabilize the narrator's reliability and mirror their mental static.
- irony
- The narrator's assertive questions about trying to win the person over are undercut by the eventual confession that they were only ever a placeholder, exposing the earlier bravado as self-delusion.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading is that this is a song about unrequited or asymmetrical desire, where the narrator understands intellectually that they are secondary to someone else in the object of their affection's life, even as they can't stop hoping otherwise. The 'lower road' becomes a metaphor for accepting a diminished, waiting role rather than real partnership. An alternative reading could treat the whole song as addressed inwardly—the narrator talking to a version of themselves or to an idealized, perhaps unreal, figure—given how abstract and interior much of the imagery (flies, silences, the bird feeder) feels; under this reading the 'you' is less a specific person than a stand-in for desire itself.
Context
Hop Along's 2018 album Bark Your Head Off, Dog leans into denser, more orchestrated arrangements than the band's earlier work, often pairing unsettling or fragmented lyrics with lush instrumentation. Frances Quinlan's songwriting frequently uses oblique, almost non-sequitur imagery to approach emotional states indirectly rather than through direct narrative, which fits this song's structure. I don't have specific confirmed biographical or production details about this particular track beyond what the lyrics and general stylistic tendencies of the album suggest.
Listen for
- How the vocal delivery handles the repeated questions—whether it sounds hopeful, anxious, or resigned as the song progresses
- The shift in instrumental intensity around the bird feeder verse compared to the more urgent 'why don't I try' sections
- The way the final repeated phrase is sung—listen for exhaustion or acceptance rather than emphasis
- Any tonal or melodic drop that marks the move from self-encouragement to the confession of being a placeholder
About Hop Along
Hop Along is an American indie rock band from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, formerly known as Hop Along, Queen Ansleis.
2005 - present / Philadelphia
Full biography and catalogue