No. 079 - Hop Along’s “Get Disowned” changed my life

A touchpoint traveling through time and space with Austin Tucker

Feb 28, 2025

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 5 min read •

In September 2012, a few months after you snag their album from a link on sophiesfloorboard, Hop Along announce their Get Disowned tour in a Tumblr post. In October, they play at The Trunk Space, a small but legendary local spot in Phoenix that had survived everything from the subprime crisis to the elections of Joe Arpaio and Jan Brewer. You and your college girlfriend, already sort of on the rocks, are going. You get in a fight in the car about something. You park in a dirt lot surrounded by a 12-foot-tall chain link fence through which you can see a highway on-ramp and a car dealership. There are only a few people at the show, maybe 15, and you get the feeling they’re mostly here for the opener, Dogbreth. The drummer for Hop Along is holding their sticks backwards. Frances Quinlan rocks a sick Fender Tweed. When they play themselves out with “Get Disowned,” the title track, they shred their voice by yelling meteor, make me young — half plea, half command — with so much sincerity you blush.

On the way home, in your girlfriend’s Camry, the music is real low and the space between you two feels totalizing, as if you’d just left some island of time you were exiled from and could never return to. You’ve crossed the perihelion and you haven’t even realized it. In both of your heads, you’re trying to arrange your respective parts in the world, placing yourselves next to each other within it, and recognizing again and again that you are small and incompatible, like so many things. You pass a commercial strip that was different just a month ago, now the bones of what will become high-rise apartments. You pass the no-interest-down auto shops, the nail salons, the bars advertising shot specials — all of which will soon become something new seemingly overnight. The streetlights shine through the industrial dust which lingers over the changing world. At her apartment, in the dark, all you can think about are those last few lines: Meteor, make me young. Make me young.

***

The Hale-Bopp Comet was first discovered on your second birthday, 1995, sixty-five miles from Phoenix, where you grew up. The sight of it was so astounding that two different stargazers found it separately, unaffiliated, on the same night, telescopes somehow tilted to the same small patch of dense space.

When you were four, you watched the Hale-Bopp Comet from your backyard, standing next to a trampoline placed just beyond a back deck that covered, for most of your life, an outdoor washer/dryer setup and an assortment of landscaping tools. Phoenix is a city of gridded infrastructure, its desert sliced neatly into wide streets and highways that lasso everything into a 25-minute drive. Around The Valley, under the right conditions, the mountains become a fuzzy purple at dusk, and when it goes dark they become again a ghostly version of themselves, a charcoal silhouette pasted over slate grey, with cell towers blinking in the foreground beneath Venus and Cassiopeia. And above it all, there was the core of the comet, so bright you could see it through the light pollution without a telescope, the white-hot dot of it smoldering, as if someone had taken a lighter and burned a hole right through the atmosphere’s lace dress and revealed a small patch of ghostly matter, some precious, inscrutable math, unseeable again for 2,300 years.

***

You play “Get Disowned” all over the city. On the 51 going 90 with the highway empty and the stereo crackling through its cheap parts, in a dorm room alone at 3 a.m. over a box of stale pizza, at a Papa John’s next to a strip club while you slice and bag meat lover’s pies, in a check cashing lobby in 2013 when the banks were closed and the rent was due and your boss wouldn’t do direct deposit, on the train to the abandoned law firm you had band practice in, skating down a parking garage exit ramp after your inevitable breakup.

You take it with you when you move east and play it on your daily, hour-long, two-bus commute across Philly, and when the parties become less party and more group cry session, and when things get weird at 4 a.m. and you’re on the floor waiting for the sun to reinvent the world before you again. It becomes a touchpoint for chronicling the thing you lose most in your life, the thing you keep losing constantly, steadily, and then all at once, often through no fault of your own: time.

***

On your 27th birthday, living in New Jersey, a Great Comet — a different one — falls slowly across the sky again. You sneak away from the party and climb up to the roof to watch it, but the clouds are out. You’re too close to the ocean. The streetlights are on in every direction. The next morning, you discover you weren’t even looking in the right place.

A few years later, you come back to Philly and wave to Frances Quinlan as you both leave an Algernon Cadwallader reunion show. You keep it cool. Outside, you and a few friends share some beers out of a backpack. Not long after, you sprawl out on the floor and play Get Disowned front to back. You’re not sure what we choose or what gets chosen, if things are cosmic or if they’re a relay of small accidents, tripwires flashing things into and out of existence. The comets get encores every couple thousand years, even if you miss them. But you? This is it. ◆

About Austin

Austin Tucker is a writer, musician, and generally feeling 6/10 these days. His poetry has appeared in Frontier and Pleiades, and his fiction was the winner in the 2024 Masters Review Flash Fiction Contest and a semifinalist for the 2018 Halifax Ranch Prize. If you dug this essay, check out his latest sitch in The Masters Review here.

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