Sam and Louise Sullivan are the next great family band

Sam and Louise Sullivan’s roots are spilling all over the place—into Oregon, the San Juan Islands, Brooklyn, and now Philadelphia. They’re siblings who’ve been performing together since they were kids; their dad is a writer who plays accordion and introduced them to Irish folk music, and their ceramist mother taught them graphic arts like printmaking. (“Our parents are not very ‘career people,’” Sam laughs. “They’re renters.”) Long car rides would take Sam and Louise to dead musicians’ birthplaces or music festivals. On trips along the Columbia River, taken so their dad could study America’s highways and waterways, the family would make stops at all the landmarks to sing the Woody Guthrie songs about them. 

While Sam assures me he’s totally repressed his childhood, he concedes that his sense of composition comes from his mother and his understanding of “lyrics as part of an inheritance” comes from his father. “You’re not making something new,” he elaborates. “You’re reinterpreting tropes and images. Making something new is about connecting to old things and making them fresh.” Louise, for her part, is deeply nostalgic about her childhood, because the act of sharing art was always around her and her brother. “That part of your life is making things,” she explains. “You get into stuff. You look something up, you see who made it, and you try to make something of your own that looks like that. You’re supposed to be surrounded by references and cool, inspirational stuff all the time. We were always supposed to be making things.” 

Two decades later, Sam and Louise are now teachers in Philadelphia who share a ceramics business. Sam resigns himself to being a failed poet. As the age-old adage goes: those who can, do; those who can’t, teach high school literature. I ask if they’re releasing their new album, Love & Devotion, this month because they’re on summer break. Sam and Louise both shake their heads. “We don’t really plan things out,” Louise says. “This is the first time we’ve had even a tiny thought about it at all.” Sam laughs in agreement. “It’s like, ‘Oh, people don’t just put their music online and tell their neighbors it’s out.’” On Friday, Louise plans to celebrate the album coming out by going to the dentist. 

But as a failed poet myself, I relate to Sam’s self-denigration and tell him as much. “Good,” he says. “It’s not trustworthy to be making poems. Poetry is for ugly people. Don’t waste your time with that.” I say it’s comforting to hear that from an English teacher. “Music is beautiful on the ears,” he responds. “You can listen to music while you’re walking. That’s important.” More versatile than a poem, I think. Love & Devotion is good walking music. 

Sam and Louise are surrounded by versatility. They’re signed to Historic New Jersey, a “home away from home recording” label managed by one of their best friends, Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko, and populated by their other best friends—singer-songwriter Emily Moales (aka Star Moles) and drummer Jem Seidel. The label name has become a front for Basko’s various production and engineering credits, namely on tapes from Sam France, The Lemon Twigs, Jake Elijah, and John Andrews. He’s indie rock’s greatest Swiss army knife you’ve never heard of. Every Star Moles album since Camelot has been a Historic New Jersey release, as have all eighty Rubber Band Gun projects. “Kevin is a huge, mega-powerful, special music-band-boy nerd,” Sam says. “Emily is totally a special, spaced-out, musical genius. They’re hearing things in a way that we’re hearing them.” 

But the siblings provide a “different angle” to the five-person collaboration. “I’m a more cynical operator when it comes to songs,” Sam admits. “I’ll just be like, ‘Songs are for women. Do not write about how bad everything is. No one wants to hear that.’ That’s an important role to play. And then Louise is like, ‘Bring the vocals to the front, let’s make sure that the girls can hear the vocals.’” And then Seidel is, as Sam so lovingly declares, “a tall, beautiful boy who never gets nervous, which is critical.” What started as five friends falling in love with Maggie and Terre Roche’s Seductive Reasoning eventually became a pact of uncoolness. “We’re never gonna have the right vibe-iness,” Sam suggests. “They’re not hip, we’re not hip. And that’s a cool vibe, because you can be sure that we’re gonna be making the real music.”

When he first moved to Philadelphia, Sam started renting a space in an art studio in town, hoping to figure out how to make his poems visually interesting. But he mostly ended up playing guitar while he was there, and soon he was writing songs for his sister to sing. They met Basko and Moales around then, through Instagram DMs. Louise recently went back and looked at their first messages, one of which said something along the lines of “You are cool, let’s make music together” in November 2021. They’ve been working together since. 

“I think Kevin and Emily and all of us kind of share a sensibility that we want things to sound wonky,” Sam mentions. “We really want it to be—not homemade, because that’s an annoying word. People are always like, ‘Oh, this is lo-fi,’ and I’m like, ‘You have no idea how hard we’re trying to get it to sound good.’” The concept of a “homemade” album now just means someone didn’t run their drums through an Apollo interface, and Basko and Moales believe that, if something starts to sound too nice, then everything sounds nice and “there’s no distinguishing” one song from another. “You have to try to get it to sound as good as possible with weird means every time,” Sam adds. “Otherwise, it’s not gonna sound like the records that you love.”

Sam and Louise are a family band, though the phrase has many connotations. Maybe the Beach Boys or the Carpenters come to mind, or the Carters, Thompsons, and Watersons. The Sullivans consider “family” to be like the Dayton Family, because their band includes Basko, Moales, and Seidel. But Sam is the primary songwriter in the group, and he only writes songs for his sister to sing. He was barely a musician when they started recording music together in 2020, making an EP using GarageBand and a USB mic plugged into Louise’s bathroom. Six years later, Sam still isn’t ready to wear the “musician” badge. “I don’t like the idea of your art being, like, ‘This is my work.’ I think that’s corny,” he says. “I like amateurs really locking in.” All the records he and his sister love have a “family band” texture, even if they’re made by famous musicians. 

They’re not looking to bring anyone from outside the family to work on their records, either. If there’s a bouzouki part that needs to be played, Basko, Moales, or Sam and Louise are going to play it. If Sam writes a song, it’s getting cut for a Sam and Louise Sullivan record, because his songwriting isn’t some infinite drip. “The demo is the record,” he says. “We’re not sitting around, being like, ‘There’s fifty songs here.’ No. This is not Nashville. These are one-at-a-time puppies, and they’re getting cut. We’re squeezing all the juice out of this.” And most of the takes are first ones. “It’s kind of a monstrosity,” Sam acknowledges. “But I’d much rather it be fresh than fussy and correct. We’re like, ‘Whatever, we’ll get it. Now we know for the next one.’”

And “the next one” comes up often in my conversation with the Sullivans. The Historic New Jersey sausage may be made in Basko and Moales’ basement, where everyone is always “dancing, bopping their head” to whatever just got recorded, but Sam says the record is never as fun as making it. “Now, all of a sudden, people are actually interested in [our music]. I’m like, ‘Shoot, but you haven’t heard what I’m about to make yet. What I’m about to make is so much better. It’s fire.’”

But I’m focused on the music that’s about to come out, and the best part about Love & Devotion is that I can tap in and immediately tell that it was made by two people who give a shit. There’s a real language of care in these songs, on soon-to-be off-kilter hits like “My Guy” and “Since I Left,” and it helps that Sam and Louise are surrounded by people who take this vocation as seriously as they do. “There are certain idiosyncrasies of what Louise and I want that Kevin has really figured out,” Sam says. “I want there to be Irish music in there, but I want it to sound not corny or traditional. He’ll sit there and figure out with me how to mix the Moog and the Casio into a fiddle break.” Louise chimes in to say she could hear “Down On Love” and “Love & Devotion” in their heads, but without the energy of Basko, Moales, and Seidel, no one else would have ever heard them. 

Sam and Louise recorded Love & Devotion while working full-time jobs as teachers—waking up at 5 a.m., grading papers, and then coming to the music world that, as Sam describes it, “maybe the high school teacher world can’t really communicate with or understand.” Being a fun and cool musician is not compatible with being a teacher unless you can synthesize it in your body, but Basko’s patience about the Sullivans’ double lives doesn’t hurt. “Looking back, I realize how hard you really have to work to make something like this with all that’s going on in your life,” Sam admits. “You have to switch off the loser part of you that’s like, ‘Did all the kids do their homework?’ because you’re worrying about which vintage drum machine you’re gonna use.” 

When I interviewed Moales earlier this year about her new album, Highway to Hell, she mentioned how she, Basko, Seidel, and the Sullivans just care so much about songs. I thought it was a wonderful perspective, to love a three-minute piece of art so much that you’re willing to devote a big part of your life to making hundreds of versions of it forever. “It’s worth harping on,” Sam concurs. “Your song should be able to be sung by someone else and it still works.” He’s a stickler about this exact thing, because he doesn’t want to hear anybody’s real perspective on the world. “Do not tell me your true feelings. I want you to filter that through a little thing called art and composition. I do not want to feel like I’m being fed a list of proper nouns out of your life. That might not have staying power.” He and Louise laugh together, and Sam eventually concedes that he’s “being a little weiner” about it. “But you know what I mean. I want it to work.”

Moales is good at tricking people into thinking she’s a confessional songwriter, like she’s playing with the paint and using the trompe l’oeil. “You’re using irony and perspective and imagery and the right combination to make the listener feel something—or sounds of words and stuff like that,” Sam jumps in. “I just think the song is the only thing that matters. The recording is whatever. I like country songwriting because I’m just like, ‘Man, these guys are killers.’ They do not care about anything else. They’re like, ‘You have thirty-five seconds to get this woman who’s driving to work to not hate you.’ If you can pull that off, that’s incredible.” Louise adds, “People worry, ‘Will I be able to convey something? How am I gonna convey it?’ And it just comes through in the application.” Anything else, like telling people how they feel in their music, would be embarrassing. 

“That’s why it’s so awesome when you hear someone sing someone else’s song, or the way Emily is singing,” Louise continues. “She and I always call each other ‘strong voice.’ We want these singers who sing out. We want to sing hard and strong. Then you get to this cool place where you have these words, but the way you sing them—and then the way someone else sings them a million years down the line—conveys something that’s interesting and of the moment. Then you don’t have to worry about recreating something else, because the feelings are timeless, and the music can be of the moment.”

Those are the songs the Sullivans grew up singing, music with an allegiance to time but can live in different places and is up to the performer to interpret. The siblings recently got an endorsement from Jeff Tweedy, a guy who’s so good at songwriting that he’s written books about doing it. Tweedy even played Sam and Louise one of their own songs, “Lonely Days, Lonely Nights,” on acoustic guitar recently, to which Sam gave the Wilco frontman a piece of sage advice. “I was like, ‘You gotta be careful with that little lightweight riff. You need a thousand-pound riff to play, buddy. That’s not big enough for you.’”

Love & Devotion is retro, but never in a dated way. Instead of revamping a relic of the past on the album, Sam and Louise tap into folk music’s party history. “You shouldn’t treat music like it’s a thing in a museum that you want to reconstruct with reverence. ‘Oh, here’s this perfect-sounding fiddle and there’s no synthesizer on this, because that would break the illusion.’” I’m reminded of the Beach Boys’ Party! album that came out six months before Pet Sounds, and how it’s just people laughing and stumbling through Beatles covers for thirty minutes. “I hear music that’s supposed to be trad, and it just feels like people are trying to deliver an artifact that’s reverential,” Sam tells me, suggesting that everyone “should just be crass and vulgar.”

Louise runs to grab a phone charger and Sam has no problem sharing some recording wisdom in her absence. “We’re not trying to make it sound vintage, but you should be giving birth to a little music baby every time. It should be difficult to do it.” I remember a comment Sam made in a previous interview, about how he doesn’t like being in a “nostalgic moment.” Music is full of innovation, but it’s also just byproduct after byproduct after byproduct. Spend hours down a Bandcamp rabbit hole and you’ll probably find something that sounds new. Sam and Louise think being derivative is cool, but they’re disinterested in recreating an aesthetic more than the actual soul of the song. “There’s a reason why ‘She walked into the bar, she was looking so good, she turned heads’ works,” Sam explains. “Keep it simple, stupid. I love feeling connected to that trope. It’s funny and ironic, but it’s also earnest.” 

If comparison is king, then Love & Devotion is this decade’s Tusk, just without the millions of dollars Lindsey Buckingham spent to sound like Talking Heads. But there is something about Buckingham’s hard, almost psychotic guitar lines balanced out by the rest of Fleetwood Mac’s desire to keep things pretty. Tusk is an album full of shameless songs, and there’s a chaos to Fleetwood Mac that’s exciting. They’re frustrated, angry, in love, coked out. I’m not sure if the Sullivans are any of those things, but I think they’re also, as Sam puts it, “releasing something by making the music” on Love & Devotion.

They’re also reclaiming something—or just misplacing it. The opening riff in “Down On Love” started as a rap beat from 2012 but wound up as a shaggy and splashy “manic, chromatic, folk-rock thing.” That’s not the only time a song started with a reference and wound up at a totally different destination. A year ago, Sam and Louise wrote “Nobody Knows the Life of a Wife of a Private Eye” together after seeing Val Kilmer’s hair in Heat. Love & Devotion has threads of Buju Banton, merengue, and Afrobeat submerged beneath five layers of folk music. Sam is currently trying to make pop songs inspired by Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” and Edward Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom. “How can you push something right to the edge of not working, but have it still be effortlessly pop? Or recognizable as pop, but just literary enough?” Sam asks. “You don’t want to alienate people.”

Sam and Louise use the phrase “go pop” a lot. I ask them what they mean by it, and Sam suggests that “go pop” means looking at the streaming data and seeing that women are listening. “There are too many dads up in there checking us out,” he laughs, possibly referring to the Solid Sound crowd. “But ‘going pop’ is writing songs like the Beatles. We’re always gonna be a little bit alt by accident. I have to wear button-down shirts and jackets to work because my students can smell the alt on me, and you need to figure out ways to rub that out. That’s what I mean by ‘going pop.’ I don’t know what Louise means, but I want this to be for people. I don’t want you to have to feel like you’re cool to be checking this out.”

“I think it’s easy,” Louise adds. “You could have it on while you and your mom are cooking dinner, and she wouldn’t turn down the radio. It’d be good for everyone.” Maybe that has to do with the family band-ness of it all. Sam and Louise’s parents come to every show, and they want to “pull people all in” and give everybody something to root for. “Also, we want to make lots of money,” Louise confirms. “We want to go popular, and we want to dance to it.” 

Jeff Tweedy may think Sam and Louise make “beautiful, well-crafted folk pop” and invite them to play his cool festival, but they’re always going to be the kind of band that plays shows “where the beer tastes like the bar,” because they never thought anyone would listen to their music. “And we made it anyway,” Sam says. “We want people to listen. We’re shouting it to all of our neighbors that we make music. We’re playing it in our cars, rolling down the windows. But it’s going to happen no matter what. We just got to do it.” 

Even if their neighbors aren’t listening, I’m ready to evangelize the Sullivans’ wonky, earnest songcraft. I take back what I said earlier about Love & Devotion being this decade’s Tusk.  Love & Devotion might just be the second coming of Shoot Out the Lights, but instead of singers going through a divorce, it’s just siblings hanging out all the time. The world can always use two voices playing off each other while a guitar bleeds into thuds of percussion made from coffee cans and exercise-ball drops, whether that’s on a Sam and Louise record or ones from Rubber Band Gun and Star Moles. But the siblings are too uncool to agree with me. “Again, I’m not a musician, so this is brand new,” Sam laughs. “Kevin and Emily are very nice. They let me play music on their records when they want a little outsider touch. They call us when they want something not characteristic.” 

Love & Devotion is out July 24 on Historic New Jersey.

Matt Mitchell is Paste‘s Editor-in-Chief. They live in Los Angeles.

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