Sam and Louise Sullivan

Sam and Louise Sullivan are a family band. They have been singing and  playing music together for as long as they can remember. They grew up  playing traditional Irish and Old-time music as their parents moved them back  and forth across the country between Brooklyn, NY, and Portland, OR, usually  driving alongside a Ryder truck. Though they never stopped playing music,  Sam and Louise studied literature and visual arts. Louise started her own  ceramics business and Sam became a high school literature teacher to pay the  bills. Later, Louise joined Sam in Philadelphia and ended up working at the  same Quaker prep school as an elementary classroom teacher. They are both  full-time, professional people who make music because they can’t afford not to.  Sam started writing songs for Louise to sing when he realized that writing his  own poetry just wasn’t cutting it. They produced an EP together during the  pandemic, sending mp3 files back and forth to one another from Germantown  to West Philadelphia, Louise recording her vocals on a usb microphone and  Sam cobbling together drums out of coffee cans and muffled exercise-ball  drops. They make music because they feel connected to the tradition of song.  Louise has a beautiful voice. Sam cares a lot about words and melody. He  writes songs by repeating them over and over in his head, a technique he  learned from his study of poetry. Louise is the visionary and the talent, holding  Sam accountable, making sure he doesn’t get too corny.

Sweet Enough is our second real recording experience. Kevin Basko produced  the album and from the moment we met him we knew that Kevin shared our  commitment to good songs and performance above tricks and aesthetics. He  knew how to force us to sing through our ramshackle tunes, live and raw, and  build out tracks that adhere to their intentional if wobbly cores. We had very  few references for this album—in fact, we rarely demo our songs. Sam brings  the songs to Louise often for the first time when they meet up at Kevin’s house,  where they play the song with an acoustic guitar a few times and then cut the  take right away. We played with a drum machine on this new record—this  vintagey box thing that Kevin has—and that was fun and exciting. We want our  songs to feel familiar without being nostalgic. There’s more info on all the  songs should anyone be interested.