Shaking Through: Hop Along’s “Sister Cities.”

Frances Quinlan is a maniac. The front woman of Hop Along says her best songs are “about other people,” and that she lacks the heavy novels of experience that others might have, the bits and pieces and pages and chapters that make for strong storytelling.

But when you study her movements and anecdotes during this month’s Shaking Through session from Weathervane Music, you either don’t believe her or you dismiss that fact altogether. Raw passion takes over and makes up for whatever dramatic, monumental experiences she might not feel she can extract from her own memories. She bleeds intensity.

The video starts out with a burst of Quinlan’s grungy, kicked-out guitar, a pretty perfect call to the rest of the episode’s attitude.

“Did I lose it?” she asks, almost immediately after ending her hard-nosed strong solo.

And that right there serves as a perfect testament to the self-consciousness the creative brain. It’s that rip it up and start again mentality, the difficult task of thought-lassoing that plagues uber-talented artists like Quinlan and at the same to is so pivotal to the creative process.