Hop Along — “Waitress”
{editors note: as part of our migration to Medium, we’ll be republishing some pieces from our old blog. Hope you enjoy!}
Ok. You know the drill. We’ve got a great performance video, and then some lyrics for you to check out and think about.
The first thing that is striking about this song, especially if you’re not familiar with Hop Along, is the singer’s voice. Francis Quinlan has an incredible voice. It’s full of grunge and rage and tenderness and grit, with a healthy edge of sarcasm and wit. It sounds like she’s just barely hanging onto the idea of the melody, and you might have to listen to a couple of their songs to realize that that’s the idea. It’s particularly fitting for this song.
According to the band, this is a song about Quinlan’s time as a waitress. I’d rather not focus on trying to guess what specific experiences she’s writing about, and instead just talk about how the lyrics hit you. There’s a certain self-conscious mixture of shame and defiance that runs through this song. Lines like “the worst possible version of what I’d done” hint at some kind of wrongdoing on the part of the narrator, and the whole second verse (“call you enemy”) exemplifies a unique frustration that comes with running into people you don’t want to see. As a side note, the guitar line on the second verse is pretty incredible. In the first verse, the lead guitar alternates between repetitive, muted notes and the more drawn out arpeggio style melody. But in the second verse, he abandons that for sharp, percussive hits and dissonant slide melodies. Interesting.
The chorus sounds mournful, like a face loses something by being seen too many times. I’m not sure I fully understand that line, but the second time it comes around, the lyrics stop mattering — when she hits “common kind” at 2:15, the break in her voice just before the explosion of music is literally the best part of the song. It’s like she breaks through all the shame and self-consciousness, and finally takes control of the anger in the song. The last verse, in which she screams “you and some others stick around” over and over is full of that anger right up until the end.
One of my favorite things about this song is that no part of it is repeated exactly. The chorus, which only happens twice, has different words each time, and the second time breaks into that incredible bridge. The three verses are all fundamentally different for all of the performers. The song evolves so much in four minutes that by the end you’ve almost forgotten the slower, choppier first verse (unless, like me, you’ve now listened to this song about three hundred times).
Hop Along is a band that never disappoints, musically or lyrically. Whether the whole band is playing as hard as possible or it’s just Quinlan and her guitar, they exude a unique combination of power, vulnerability, anger, kindness, and ultimately, humanity.
— josh
song/study is a series of single-song reviews, designed as deep-dives into individual works of art. Read more or submit here.
