The Songs That Bind: Field Medic

In my time as a music writer, I’ve had the chance to share communities and spaces with some of the very best artists in the world. I hold that privilege close and will never take it for granted. Nine times out of 10, I’m interviewing someone about their music because it has, in some form or another, changed my life. That’s why we do this, right? Being someone who has spent so many days devoted to the forever-expanding landscape of music, I don’t shy away from telling someone that a song they wrote changed my life. We deserve to tell our heroes that they’ve made tumbling through this world even the slightest bit easier.

But I wanted to flip the script and call up some good friends and favorite songwriters and get the scoop on the songs they hold closest to their hearts. In the series’ third installment, I spent some time with Kevin Patrick Sullivan—aka Field Medic. This time around, Kevin opted to finesse my system by picking three songs in total. I’ll allow it, but just this once.

I met Kevin for the first time some years ago after a gig at Mahall’s in Lakewood, Ohio in 2019. My partner at the time—our “song” was “OTL” and, for our second anniversary, we took a trip up to Cleveland from our college campus to watch Field Medic open for Beach Bunny, hoping to hear that one beautiful tune. And, of course, Kevin played it—but not before I sent him a DM on Instagram asking if it would be in the setlist. Fast-forward across the pandemic, and Kevin is putting out his “big budget” Field Medic album, grow your hair long if you’re wanting to see something that you can change. I was still freelancing, still hoping that an editor will take a chance on me. I’m already in this mode where, if I can help it, I’m only writing about musicians I adore. I have to profile Field Medic. And Paste was, at the time, gracious enough to give me a shot doing so.

Now, I’m lucky enough to call Kevin a good friend who I can hit up for anything, be it talking about tattoo regrets or shooting the shit about vintage Dale Earnhardt shirts. The world he’s created with Field Medic is one that is vulnerable, nuanced and gloomy—all in ways that make our own maladies a bit more palatable. Listening to a record like Songs From the Sunroom or Floral Prince is like excavating bad decisions until a core clarity is revealed. I love Kevin for that, for how the road to recovery is not a crystallized destination in his work, but an active practice that is never perfect. When I was formulating the basis for this series, I knew he would be a guest on it—once he announced his new album, light is gone 2, it was just a matter of when.

For chapter three of The Songs That Bind, Kevin talks about Joni Mitchell’s “River,” from her 1971 album Blue and Kendrick Lamar’s “m.A.A.d city,” from his 2012 album good kid, m.A.A.d city—as well as his own tune, “p e g a s u s t h o t z.”

You can catch up on our previous two installments of The Songs That Bind here and here.

Joni Mitchell: “River” / Kendrick Lamar: “m.A.A.d city”

When I was thinking about songs that really impacted me, it was these two songs in particular. It was this vocal style, because Joni Mitchell’s music is all very raw. I would say the whole album, Blue, was very inspirational, but “River,” the very last time she says “skate away on,” her voice doesn’t quite crack, but it’s very imperfect. I was so moved by that, and the whole record. But, in that one moment, I realized that the imperfection of the vocal is part of what made it so good. At the time, I was still recording with my old band and we were trying to make “real studio-ready music” or whatever the fuck. My voice cracked all the time, and hearing Joni do that felt very liberating. And, of course, among listening to Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dylan and all of these other ‘60s, ‘70s artists that record live—just noticing that what I actually found appealing about their music was the rawness. Then, somewhere around that time, good kid, m.A.A.d city came out. And then I heard “m.A.A.d city,” where Kendrick Lamar’s voice is super cracking and very emotive for that same reason. Even though the songs are obviously very different, just hearing Kendrick do that to an even more extreme degree than Joni Mitchell—or anyone else that has a little voice crack here and there—I was just like, “Dude, this is sick. This sounds so cool and raw.” Once again, I felt empowered to not be so worried about vocal inconsistencies in my own recording. The thing that changed everything, oddly enough, was some amalgamation of those two songs. I remember, very specifically, having a moment with those two songs somewhere in the span of a year or so—and something clicking in my head and realizing that a raw vocal is chill.

I was 19 or 20 years old—and I’d already been super obsessed with Bob Dylan and Nick Drake. I decided that it was time to listen to Joni, because I’d heard so much about her. I had a little bit of a pill—I wouldn’t say “problem,” but I had access to painkillers at that time, so I would take them. One night, I took a couple Vicodin and I turned off the lights and I just listened to Blue front to back and I was like, “Whoa, this is fucking crazy.” It wasn’t even “River” on that first listen that really got me. It was “All I Want.” I thought it was really cute and nice and, as the years have passed, that full record is just perfect to me. Most of her catalog, even through the ‘80s, ‘90s, I fucking love that shit. But it was really that one night in my room in San Francisco on Vicodin listening to Blue by Joni Mitchell in the dark on Rhapsody.

My dad had a Rhapsody account that I had access to, so that was my first introduction to streaming music. With Kendrick, “Swimming Pools (Drank)” came out and that was a radio hit, but I didn’t really think much of it. I think it must have been my brother Sean—because at that time, my brother was hella Drake-addicted—who showed me good kid, m.A.A.d city, the album. I always liked it, but it was always just that one song that I’ll return to. I do love Kendrick Lamar but—from that record—I’m always like, “Dude, put on that one song.” And it’s the first section of that song, too, because the super staccato voice-breaking and violent lyrics really caught my ear.

Something about those two songs that I appreciate—in a lot of songs that I love, and what’s always been most important to me—is the lyrics. Both of those songs tell a story, although a very different one. They’re descriptive, and Kendrick’s is more personal. He’s saying the names of his friends, which I’ve always thought is a cool device in writing. But, the way that Joni is painting this portrait of “It’s Christmastime, and I’m gonna skate away” and then, at the very end, she’s like, “I made my baby cry.” That’s the end of the first verse and you’re like, “Wait, what?” Then she goes on to vaguely detail this romance that’s gone amiss. It’s nice to mix the metaphor with reality. It’s always been a songwriting style that I’ve really liked, where you’re saying something that’s very abstract. In her case, the lyric “I made my baby cry” is the definite article that, all of a sudden, gives context to the blustery, wintry sort of thing. For me, what came up first is the lyrical style. But, of course, underneath that, [“River” and “m.A.A.d city”] both have a very compelling narrative that is important and emotional—and you can tell it’s real to [Joni and Kendrick]. I aspire to do stuff like that. In the sense of vocals being raw, that’s a part of the story, too—where it’s rough around the edges and it allows something to be a better vessel for telling the story.

Field Medic: “p e g a s u s t h o t z”

I’d written the guitar part and I had written the verses. I suppose it’s a song about falling out of love. The original chorus, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was—but it was the same melody. At the time, I was really interested in 1) whacky spelling, which is very obvious from the title itself, and 2) replacing lyrics with more interesting lyrics. The gist of the original chorus was “No needs, no wants, just doing whatever I want”—something dumb like that. And, because I was obsessed with writing haikus at the time, syllables were really flowing in my head. I was like “pegasus thoughts.” I think I was reading a book and the word “pegasus” came up and I was like, “Well, that’s kind of crazy and mystical.” I was still using painkillers recreationally. I would work Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. Every Monday night, when I came home from work, I would take a couple of painkillers, drink a bunch of beer, smoke a bunch of cigs and just watercolor and write songs. My relationship at the time was falling apart, I would be totally unreachable—I didn’t have a smartphone, I had a trap phone. I would go into my room—my design room, as it were—and just be super fucked up, making art. When the phrase “pegasus thoughts” came up, I was like “That is the state of mind of ‘pegasus thoughts,’” where nobody is on my case about anything, nobody is expecting anything from me. Maybe they are, but I’m ignoring them. This divine bliss of being high and drunk and just creating is the state of “pegasus thoughts.”

The way that “River” and “m.A.A.d city” influenced it—P E G A S U S T H O T Z, the EP, was the first lo-fi record I made. When my roommates would leave, I would go into the kitchen—because my room was too small to record in, and there was also some reverb in the kitchen—and I would very quickly set up my mics and my tape machine. The beat for “p e g a s u s t h o t z,” I recorded it into a completely unknown—I recorded it for some amount of time, I have no idea how long, and the I went to record the song and the beat just stopped, because I was playing with the beat in my headphones. It was like a metronome, and the beat just stopped. So I just stopped the song and, then, that was the tape. There was just one mic, guitar and vocal, and it was this very haphazard style of recording. I’m sure [“River” and “m.A.A.d city”] had much more production value in mind, but I just felt empowered by the rawness that I experienced in those songs—to be like, “Okay, this isn’t a perfect take, but it feels right. The Thrift God has ordained that the drums end right there, so that’s where the song ends.” And that was that.

One of the reasons I wanted to call my new album light is gone 2 is that, from Fade Into the Dawn through [grow your hair long if you’re wanting to see something that you can change], I was slowly trying to figure out how to get that feeling back that I had when I was making my old stuff. Most of those records have one lo-fi song on them but, for some reason, when I was recording with the tape machine, it felt like a chore—or something that didn’t really feel natural anymore. I’d just done it so much that it no longer had that feeling of discovery and excitement. It was almost like, “I’m going to do this because I know how.” When I started producing light is gone 2, I was very, very actively—in the same timeframe—learning about all of this shit I was doing, learning about programming drums, learning about synth patches, auto-tune plug-ins. I found myself having a lot of fun. Not to say that it’s not fun to record—the last record is pretty fucking depressing, so I don’t know if I can say that it was fun to record—but I really did feel like, when I was in my stu making light is gone 2, I was really following my muse and having hella fun just letting the art lead the way. Not to get too New Age about it, but it felt like I was just going in the kitchen really quickly when all my roommates had left.

There’s a couple of vocal styles on the new record that are super out of pocket—spacey, whiny shit I’ve never done before. And I say that with love, don’t quote me in a bad way. I like whiny stuff and I would, honestly, when I was doing these vocal takes, I’d be like, “Okay, Derek’s gone, I can be wailing and shit.” It was the first time in a long time that I felt very excited about just seeing what happens, because I feel like the magic of music and recording is not really knowing where it’s going—similar to the drumbeat just ending on “p e g a s u s t h o t z.” I wrote all the songs [on light is gone 2] as acoustic songs, I recorded them into the computer and then I just completely blasted them to smithereens and let them become something new based on wherever I was being led. I didn’t want to just leave the songs sitting dormant, because I learned so much while making them and I feel like they deserved to be heard as a part of the story. Even though it’s dingy and crazy, to me, it’s still really raw—because it was my first attempt at making something like that. It’s certainly lo-fi in nature, even though it’s digital. I still made it all by myself right here at the crib. It has a lo-fi mentality. I have this experience sometimes, when a single comes out or something, and I’ll hear the song again for the first time. I’m like, “Damn, I can’t believe I made that. That’s crazy.” And that’s how I felt when I first listened to the P E G A S U S T H O T Z EP as a whole—where the sound I was trying to make, I finally figured it out.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.