Love & Devotion is one of the best albums of the year, but are we sure it’s from this year? The third LP from Philadelphia-based siblings Sam and Louise Sullivan plays like a lost treasure that has been collecting dust for decades and is now being reissued by Light In The Attic. Pulling inspiration from retro psych-pop, country, traditional folk, funk, reggae, and a wide range of global sounds, the Sullivans ended up with a batch of songs so charming, catchy, and “wonky” (their word) that it simultaneously feels fresh and sounds like it was recorded half a century ago.
They’ve been at it since COVID — in a sense, they’ve been at it their whole lives — but a lot of people have been catching on lately. Last year’s Sweet Enough caught the ear of Jeff Tweedy, who invited Sam and Louise to perform repeatedly throughout Wilco’s Solid Sound festival in June. Rising buzz for Emily Moales (aka Star Moles) and Kevin Basko (aka Rubber Band Gun), their friends and collaborators within Philly’s Historic New Jersey collective, has also brightened the duo’s newfound spotlight. All of the sudden, offers and invites are accumulating, like the chance to open three recent shows for Australia’s Babe Rainbow, a major upgrade from their usual gigs in basements and dive bars.
“They just hit us up on the internet and were like, ‘Come play these shows with us,’” a bewildered Sam says, quickly switching into playful-misanthrope mode. “They were really, really, really, really nice. Like, they're happy, healthy Australians. They're all extremely tall and attractive, and they're really nice. I don't know what's going on with them.”
More such opportunities are in the queue. It’s just a matter of finding ways for Sam to step away from his day job teaching at a local Quaker school, where Louise also worked until recently. In the meantime, they’ve got another set of songs lined up to record at Moales and Basko’s basement studio starting next week. More than their expanding career horizons, it sounds like what thrills them most is the chance to one-up themselves creatively yet again.
I connected with Sam and Louise on a video call two days ago and had a splendid time getting to know the people behind such enchanting music. Press play on Love & Devotion and read our conversation below.
On the album, you sing “I’m a little crazy/ I wasn’t even born in the ‘80s.” So when were you both born, and where? Let’s just start at the beginning.
SAM SULLIVAN: I was born in 1991 in Morristown, New Jersey. But my parents were living in Brooklyn at the time.
LOUISE SULLIVAN: And then I was born in 1996 in Portland, Oregon. Our mom is from Portland, and our dad is from New Jersey and Queens. So our parents lived out there for a little bit, they had baby Sam, then they moved back to Oregon and we kind of hung out there for a bit. And then in 2000, we moved to New York. And I grew up there, in Brooklyn.
SAM: And then we moved back to Oregon for a second there, and then we moved back to Hastings-On-Hudson, which is near Yonkers. Then we moved back to Brooklyn for another eight years.
LOUISE: We went to high school. Sam went to college. He lived around the Northeast a little bit, and then he moved to Philly. And then in 2018, I graduated college. I moved to Philly, too, so we have been here for a little bit.
Do you have any other siblings?
LOUISE: No, just the two! That would be hard for them, if they didn't make the band.
It's like the fourth Jonas brother.
LOUISE: Yeah, so true. Our dad's upset because he used to be in the band. He would play his accordion. Then we’re like, “No, no, no.”
SAM: He's like our fourth Jonas brother. What's the fourth Jonas brother's name?
I honestly don't know. Sucks to be him.
SAM: Which is the Jonas brother with diabetes?
LOUISE: He has Type 1, I think. Isn't it Nick?
SAM: My wife just got Type 1 diabetes, so I'm very locked in. But I mean, if Nick can do it?
So Dad used to be in the band, though? He used to play with you?
LOUISE: Yeah, we played music a bunch as kids. And our dad loves music, loves traditional music. We played a lot of Irish music growing up. So when we lived in Westchester, my dad and I took tin whistle lessons at White Plains Community Center. We were playing traditional Irish music a bunch. And then he would hook up ways for us to play sing-along parties, stuff like that. There was a lot of music around when we were growing up for sure.
SAM: It was a folk and trad kind of thing.
That's what I imagined when I was reading your bio — the family sitting around playing songs together. I'm happy to hear that that was actually how it was.
SAM: Yeah, that was accurate.
LOUISE: Yeah, and our mom's a different [kind of] maker. She's like artist, visual, textile, ceramics. So there's lots of making stuff.
And you have a ceramics business too, right? Or you did?
LOUISE: I do. I know, I need to make some more ceramics for it now that it's in the paper. I need to get on that. Nagging! I was at the studio last week, like OK? But yeah, Sam is a teacher, and I've been a teacher for the past five years, and I'm just not going back this year. Trying to figure it out. So ceramics is happening now, maybe some music, hanging out, that kind of thing. We make lots of stuff. It's fun.
I read that you learned these folk songs at a school on an old farm in Oregon. Is that separate from what you did with your family?
SAM: Yeah, I was at a kind of hippie school in Tualatin. We would practice calligraphy and watch the goats give birth and stuff. Then I went to public school for a while in Hastings. And then I went to a prep school where my mom worked for high school. Now, I work at a Quaker school, which is like a different northeast flavor of hippie. Like, they share things with the hippies, but they're not quite — it's a little bit different.
LOUISE: There's still some really good songs that we sing all together. Everyone knows the words, so it's a good moment.
What was the impetus for moving to Philly?
SAM: I Irish-exited Providence, where I was living, just because I was like, “I need a job. My health insurance is running out.” I was 24 or something. And then I got a job working as an English teacher. I'm a failed poet. So I was teaching English and stuff. And then I got a job, like a legit job teaching high school English lit at this prep school that I work at now, the Quaker school. It was all money-related. I was biking around Providence trying to go get a check for something I'd already done. I was putting my bike on the front of the RIPTA. It was snow and ice and just like crusty dogs everywhere, and I was like, “I gotta get out of here.”
Had this current era of writing and performing songs together begun before you were together in Philly?
SAM: This is a new thing, writing music and singing it. COVID happened. We were like, “Let's make some tunes of our own.” And then we met all of our music homies here in Philly. And through that, I was like, “Oh, OK, I'll write a whole bunch of songs.” And then I wrote a whole bunch of songs, just because writing songs is more fun than writing poems. It's not as much of a vibe killer.
LOUISE: Yeah, we made this album in like 2020. We were just passing files back and forth to each other. I was setting up stuff in my bathroom, and then Sam was playing things up here in Germantown at his house. We met Kevin Basko of Rubber Band Gun and Emily Moales of Star Moles. They were making music, and it just got really fun. Because it was like we could make something that sounded real, and we could spend some time really thinking about what we wanted to do.
SAM: Yeah, we're all one big hangout party.
LOUISE: Yeah, and we all like a lot of the same music and know how we wanted to make stuff sound. We like all the same references and people. So it was super fun to meet them. And that came about through an Instagram DM, which is how everything gets done these days, I guess.
SAM: I think we also were trying to write a certain kind of song that was not — I don't know, we were trying to write “song” songs that could be sung by other people, that didn't have to totally rely on a vibe, you know? It could be a vibe, or it could be another vibe. It doesn't really matter. Everyone wants to be writing the song that works for all time — with some exceptions, obviously. Vibes are cool, but you know what I mean. Everyone in that group is, we're kind of like, “How do you make a song that works?” you know?
LOUISE: And it was cool because we obviously listen to all these different genres of music, but it feels fun to make music where we can pull lots of different pieces, from all of these different genres or influences, and make something that doesn't sound like we're trying to recreate exactly the thing that we like. It's a mix of all this other stuff that comes in, like a collage, which is fun. It felt fun to meet Emily and Kevin because they can do so much, and we can work all in that way collaboratively.
You mentioned you met through an Instagram DM, but who DM'ed who?
LOUISE: Kevin slid into our DMs, yeah.
SAM: And I don't — like, listen. I don't know what's good with, like, indie rock. I'm finding out about bands and stuff, really, right now. And Kevin is a low-key legend. I didn't really realize it, but he has a thousand million albums. All the real ball-knowers know about Kevin. And, I mean, obviously Star Moles is like — those are the indie rock bands I listen to now.
LOUISE: Yeah, we went from being the people who had the cassette in our car and that was what we were listening to — like whatever was stuck in our CD player, because our cars are old and they just play whatever.
SAM: We're developing our contemporary music as of right now. Contemporary music, really what I was listening to until I met Kevin and Emily was, like, Burna Boy. Which is great. I still listen to Burna Boy.
What did Kevin and Emily bring to your music? I mean, obviously camaraderie — it sounds like you have good social vibes.
SAM: We really are working on each other's stuff a lot. Kevin is working on a record. I just got to play a bunch of stuff on it. We play on each other's stuff a lot. Also, there's a lot of like, “How are we going to get from this part of the song to that part of the song?” “Why don't we have a little thing here that does that?” I'm like, “Cut this word.” He's like, “Cut that word,” you know? So we're up in each other's sauce.
LOUISE: It's like that thing where you're sitting around people and you're like, “I'm hearing this, how can we make that sound like…” or, “Oh wait, maybe that part's not on the guitar, it's on the piano or it's like in the melody.” So there's a lot that happens in the arrangement that I feel like we're working on together
SAM: Oh, they help us arrange and and vice versa
LOUISE: At the beginning, Sam and I were coming after school to Kevin's house, and we would have a song that we knew the first verse and chorus to. And we would lay it down a little bit, and then we'd really build it from the bottom,
SAM: Usually in the beginning, I would write a song, just sing it with a guitar, and then we'd overdub drums. It's a psychotic way of making music.
LOUISE: And we realized that was really hard to do.
SAM: It's all very charming and fun. We have a very chaotic process, and I think it leads to making things that sound, like, boutique. You're not going to get the same drum sound twice. Never happened.
LOUISE: We can't really get the wonk away from us. People are like, Oh, it's not…” We're like “We're trying our hardest.”
SAM: People are like, “It's intentionally rustic.” I'm like, no, we're trying to make this sound like Pink.
LOUISE: So yeah, some of the ways that we do it kind of haphazardly or randomly is because we don't know a different way.
SAM: I get people to be like, “Oh, this sounds like X, Y, Z lo-fi contemporary artist,” or something, and I'm like, “I was trying to make it sound like Bob Marley, so, oh well.”
LOUISE: But yeah, it's really fun. I think what they bring is a really important musical sense to everything, and also follow-through, and a know-how that is really awesome. We get to contribute to their stuff too, and it's really, really, really fun. Everyone is always working on something at the same time in the basement, and we're trading, like opening it up and, “Let's solve this.”
You mentioned having a cassette or CD stuck in your car. Were there any albums in particular that were stuck in the car stereo?
SAM: OK, so the Buju Banton album Inna Heights. That album, really really good. Love that album. The frigging Chichí Peralta record called Pa' Otro La'o, that is critical, critical, critical. Let's see, what else I was really, really, really spinning. This album by Africando, they're like a Fania All-Stars group, and it's called Gombo Salsa. And then CDs, you know, the Roches,
LOUISE: We're big Roches fans, Maggie and Terre Roche.
SAM: Bruce Molsky?
LOUISE: Bruce Molsky.
SAM: I love Bruce Molsky.
LOUISE: Really great fiddler, trad musician.
SAM: I definitely like reggae, like Junior Reid and stuff like that.
LOUISE: And then your classic, like, Bonnie Raitt.
SAM: Bonnie Raitt. The Beatles.
LOUISE: I listen to Iris Dement.
SAM: Yeah, the Beatles. We have the Beatles poster with the lads up there.
LOUISE: Yeah, we love the Beatles. They're a really good band.
I've been hearing good things. You've carved out your own little corner of the music scene there, this mini community. Do you feel connected to the larger music community in Philadelphia? Do you have other connections there in town, like bands that you like to play with or that you're friendly with?
SAM: Well, yes. First of all, I feel connected to Babe Rainbow. I should say that really, those guys are super cool. Like, I would do anything for them. They're the bomb.
LOUISE: Definitely in Philly there's a lot of people, there's a lot of music.
SAM: We half-know a bunch of people.
LOUISE: We're friends with a bunch of people. I feel like it's coming into play. You hit that point in your early twenties, like, “Oh, I’m at a party with everyone, and it turns out, oh my god, we’re all musicians. Turns out we all want to make music in a similar way.”
SAM: Definitely art people, too.
LOUISE: So it feels like there's something hooking up, and we're all at a similar time in our lives where it's like, “Oh, maybe this is actually a real thing.” But we're at parties. We're hanging out. We're going to different places with all these people, and then you're sort of like, “Oh my gosh, you guys just did a tour.” But yeah, I can think of a bunch of people who play music in Philly who we’re friendly with and love, and we've played a bunch of shows in Philly for the past bunch of years, just playing at lots of different venues and getting out there. Sometimes just playing as a duo, and then more recently playing with Emily and Kevin in our band and Jem [Seidel], who's our drummer. And trying to get that sound from our records out there,
SAM: Like a rock outfit moment.
LOUISE: But for a long time, Sam and I just played as a duo all around in Philly.
The first two albums (2025's Sweet Enough and 2023's Papier Mâché) are really good, but this new one feels like a leap to me. The songs are great, but also it feels like the style is just really distinctive, kind of funky. I know you had the one press quote about Kool & The Gang played by a hoedown band. How did you zero in on this particular aesthetic for this record?
SAM: Thank you for saying that. I'm still chasing the ghost a little bit. First of all, everything that's out is nothing compared to what we're working on right now. You have no idea. Funky is an understatement. It's gonna be like butter. Everything coming out is like basted with cultured butter. It's about to be crazy.
I think that one thing is I really don't like it when I feel like I know how… I'm always listening to “King Harvest,” the Band song, and I was like, “How on earth? These drums, they sound like…” Like, the performance is incredible. Everything is dilating a little bit. The mix is wonky. I was listening to the Beatles. I was like, “This is an insane-sounding recording.” I like things to sound insane and, like, out of pocket. And I think that's a key element of the funkiness.
The other thing is, I like many takes of drums overdubbed on top of each other. I like it to feel like all those Dominican albums that I love. There's a certain third groove that comes out of more than one part getting played at the same time.
LOUISE: We always like it to sound like when you go to a party and there's a band there, so it's like space. There's weird space in the sound. I feel like that's always something we’re chasing is something that feels live. You're like, “Why does that sound weird?” Like it's far away, but the voice is close.
SAM: Not too many vocal takes. It's got to be not totally perfect.
LOUISE: We can't do it perfect.
SAM: We can't do it perfect anyway. And then also I think like I'm really searching for a sound that takes those elements of Irish music that I like and old English music and American music and presents them… I love the trad revival of the ‘70s and stuff because it's so hip and feels present. And I wanna take that into a dance, to help it be party music, you know what I mean? In a way that's not, like, fusion, if that makes any sense. But it can do its thing and like people can realize how live — and the broader Atlantic sound thing, you know what I mean?
LOUISE: I'm always thinking about the word collage because things are placed on top of each other. So there's sometimes an awkwardness there because you're not mixing, you're not integrating it always, but you're layering in a way that we like to do, which feels fun to do. Then it feels like something is maybe a little, you're like, “Is this out of place?” and like, “Wait a minute, it fits.” You're not always weaving things together so perfectly, you're putting it on top of the pile in a fun way.
The rhythmic quality of the album really stood out to me. Even on a song like “Ms. Mercedes” where the arrangement is minimal, there's just fascinating things going on with the groove. You talked about how before you would write a song and then put the drums over top of it. What is the process of building these grooves like now? Do you start with a rhythm and write over that?
SAM: That song is mad tricky.
LOUISE: That song we played live a bunch. Like, we've been playing that song for probably three or four years, just me and Sam on the guitar. And then we were playing it in this more rock jazz, more predictable way. But then when we had to go put it down, we were like…
SAM: I can tell the truth about it, which is that I… See, some real knowers on the internet… All of a sudden people are listening to our music, which is awesome, and sick, and amazing. But what that means is that like real dads are out there checking us out, you know what I mean? And they know what I did, which is, I made that song just using…
There's a Ry Cooder song called “How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live,” and the live version of it starts with this little loop that never comes back after he does it one time in the song. And I'm always like, “That's the hippest shit I've ever heard.” Like, “Why’d you take that from me after one second?” And so I basically interpolated that loop for the verse. And then in the bridge of the song, I quote Ry Cooder, except it's “How can a poor girl stand these times.” So that's a shout out to all my real dads out there knowing. And some people have hit me up being like, “I see what you did there,” and I was like, [coyly, sheepishly] “I know. You know.”
LOUISE: And then we put in the fiddle so it sounds a little something weird. Also, I'm just not that… I played fiddle for so long, but I still can't get my pinky finger to do the right thing, so it's always a little bit wonky.
SAM: So I was trying to get that Afrikando group vibe, mixed with Ry Cooder, mixed with, like, American sound, and have it sound like I was doing “world music” or whatever.
So that song, it’s like you retrofitted this groove to it. The first couple of songs on the album, the singles, they grab you on the rhythmic level before you even start singing. And then there's a whole other aspect of getting grabbed by the hooks and the lyrics. Are you still writing chord changes and lyrics first and building the other stuff up around it, or do you ever just, like, jam, and then a song comes out of that?
SAM: No, I never jam and a song comes out of that. What it is, is I'll hear a song, and then Louise or someone will be like, “You have to make a song like that song.” And then I'll be like, “OK, how are we gonna do that?” I never get there. But, like, for “Down On Love” and “Love & Devotion,” I knew exactly what quality I wanted them to have. And then me and Kevin, you know, we kind of… I get my special boy involved, and we sit down, and I'm super annoying with him, and we shed that for months, to get “Love & Devotion” to sound the way I wanted it.
LOUISE: It is very fun. Because obviously we made the record a while ago, and now it's out, and we were like, “Oh, we don't like this.” And then we were like, “OK, we're just gonna get it out so we can make the next one.” Like, whatever. But yeah, when we were making it, there were aspects of it that felt like torture. We were like, “Uh, is this the right thing? Does it sound still nice and fun to listen to?”
SAM: But yeah, I'll definitely write a song, and I'll be like, “OK, Kevin, we're going to record this, and you're going to play drums right now. Only play the ands. I don't want to hear any…” you know. And then we'll all be forced to do a million takes. And I'm an awful guitar player, so it takes me a million takes to do something. I'm awful.
LOUISE: And then we might record it, and then a bunch of weeks later be like, “We have to re-record the whole vocals.”
SAM: But then we never do because we're busy. We're full-time people, so our lives are crazy, so we're like, “OK, I guess that's what's going on in the record.”
The lyrics are also incredibly striking. It continues throughout the record, but just going off of the first couple of songs, two that stuck with me were, “Even when you're wrong, you're wrong for all the right reasons/ Even the mistakes you make have a certain cohesion.” And then the other one, “Can't explain why I wasted the space in my brain trying to memorize all your stuff.” What's the lyrical writing process? Is it just a phrase will stick with you, and you'll have it in your little notebook, and it's like, “I gotta use this in a song?” I guess what I'm trying to say is, the lyrics have a flow to them. They don't sound tortured, they don't sound overly labored over, but at the same time, there's a lot going on there in terms of syllables and language. I was really struck by how it all comes together.
LOUISE: We have like “a three syllable word ending in i-o-n." It’s very important.
SAM: Louise gets on me because of my little… but I definitely think writing songs is way harder than any other kind of writing because I'm always like, “You have 15 seconds to make this woman who's listening to this record decide that they don't hate you. So you better get all that stuff about you and your bad day, and all these things that you think are unique and special, you better get that shit out of there. You're allowed like one word that's sticky-outy. Or like one concept per song, you're allowed to have it be sticky-outy. And if it is sticky-outy, it needs to be intuitively fun for the listener.
And I'm very cynical about this type of thing. I love pop music, and I love the form and stuff. And I'll always be kind of alt as a person. So I think it's really fun to kind of try to beat that out of myself and make something that feels natural for the listener, and is just kitschy enough or just thoughtful enough to get you thinking a little bit, but not… I like tropes. I like cliches. I like aesthetics.
LOUISE: It sounds so good when you sing the word “baby.” It’s so nice to say the word “baby” in a song.
SAM: It sounds good.
LOUISE: Make it sound good and don't worry about it. It will come out. It will still feel like it's you singing it or whatever. I think that's the thing that feels good. We're not worried about if it feels real.
SAM: Or cool. I don't want it to be cool.
LOUISE: We're just like, "This is what works for the song," or, "This is the character in the song."
SAM: But I usually start with words before music. I have a couple of word ideas that I know are gonna happen, and then I'm trying to figure out how to sing them.
That makes sense, since you started as a poet. Are these songs based on real life experiences, or are you just imagining scenarios that would make for good songs?
SAM: Usually not my life or anything really in my life. More like, I'll be like, “My friends, all the girls in my life, they were talking about this thing, and I thought it's funny.” And I'll be like, let's try and get that funny idea…
LOUISE: We're a bit family. We're, like, picking up phrases, we're doing bits, we're thinking about this movie and this person's hairstyle and the dress in the movie and what that looks like. And some of it is crossing over. And that's the crossover between life and what you're making. But I think it's [not] like, “Oh my gosh, we just got broken up with.” Like, “So sad.”
SAM: At the risk of sounding like a jerk, if I feel for one second that you're writing exactly about your life as it happened to you, I'm scared. I get scared.
LOUISE: Yeah, I think we're trying to like… we think that there's something interesting about some distance in that, lyrically. And I think that comes maybe from an interest… Maybe there is some sort of connection with traditional music in that way, where it's like, yeah, every song is about a beautiful heartbreak…
SAM: It’s about everyone…
LOUISE: …and life and death and love and looking pretty, or feeling good or not feeling good. So I think we're interested in writing a love song, or a song when you're feeling sad, but that there's some distance there between the actual day-to-day events of your life. We joke with… We teach children who are always like, “Oh my God, I can't believe this happened to the character in the book.” And you're like, “Yeah, it was on purpose. It was written.”
SAM: It’s not real. The movie didn't really happen. The characters are not real in this book. They're made up by the author.
LOUISE: They'll get mad at the character in the book. They'll be like, “How could you do that?” We’ll be like, "It was for a point. It was for the plot." So yeah, we like that distance.
When I think about brother/sister acts, the first one I think of is Fiery Furnaces, but they seem a bit more obtuse than you two. I don't know if you anticipate any wild left turns of their ilk, like eight-minute prog songs or an album sung by a grandparent.
SAM: I don't really know what's good with them.
They were popping off in the 2000s, mostly.
SAM: I know, like, the Louvin Brothers. But no, I think our next record, my plan is to make it all super hot fire, straight hits, bomb after bomb after bomb.
LOUISE: That's the plan.
SAM: That's my plan. And also, I'm barely a musician. Louise is a very talented singer who has a little more musical training than I do.
LOUISE: I have, like, stage dementia. I forget everything, all the words.
SAM: If I write a song, it's getting cut, you know what I mean? And I labor over this stuff to get it… the 10 songs on the album are the 10 songs that we had. So the people are like, “Oh, what direction do you want to take it?" I'm like, “I'm taking it in the direction of being able to do it.”
Jeff Tweedy has been advocating for your music, and you had a bunch of performances at Wilco's Solid Sound festival earlier this summer. Did you have any memorable interactions with them there?
SAM: Oh hell yeah. We got to sing onstage with the Wilco people. That was amazing.
LOUISE: And with Mermaid Ave. Natalie Merchant was there.
SAM: The vibes were awesome. Everyone was super sweet and just tapping in with us and saying what's up. It was crazy.
LOUISE: And that's really music that we really listened to. Our parents took us on a bunch of road trips, and we went to Chicago basically so we could see the towers that are on the cover of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
SAM: And Billy Bragg is a big… we listened to a lot of his music growing up. And it was just like… Before like five minutes ago, no one ever asked us to play gigs except like Rando McRando in the basement of Rando with warm beer and more randos. That's mostly what we were playing. And then all of a sudden, we got that gig, all these people are hitting us up. It's really fun and cool.
LOUISE: And we met so many amazing musicians who are in Chicago who are playing music there. That was really exciting.
SAM: Like, you can hear yourself onstage. Jeff was like, “Here’s this guitar part, how does it sound?”
LOUISE: It was incredible.
SAM: We got to see Jeff Tweedy's backstage warmup. It was crazy,
LOUISE: So yeah, we felt super grateful, excited.
SAM: I really like this band we met, Living Hour from Canada. They're really nice.
LOUISE: We listened to Hannah Cohen. She sounded amazing. Just a ton of people who were there. And we're just trying to scour, just trying to ask everyone for their wisdom, for information.
SAM: I would do that once a week. I would do that twice a week.
LOUISE: We're also just not people… Like you said, we've been busy just working, and so we were excited to be at a festival. We thought that was really fun. We got to go to MASS MoCA.
SAM: I'm a job haver. I'm like a “Did you do your reading?” type guy.
LOUISE: I have a Sunday night ritual that if I don't do, I won't be able to make it through the next rest of the week. So it's been really exciting to meet people who make music all the time, who can do that.
Do you think that you will tour this record at all, since you are job havers?
SAM: We’re in conversations about all that. Like, listen. When I say we're really new to everything that's going on, I really mean that we're really new. We thought that no one was ever gonna listen to our music. But that was fine.
LOUISE: We were making it anyway, you know what I mean?
SAM: I thought it was sick.
LOUISE: I think what's fun is like, when you say like, “What do these people give you in Philly?” We're ready to live our whole lives wherever we are. We just had a show with Emily and Kevin. We made a big show so we could have a big show and play all of our music for two hours, and that was amazing.
SAM: It’s kind of nice to know that maybe people would come to shows if we played them. And then it's also nice to know that… I'm 35, so I don't feel fear in my heart about my ability, or our ability, to make more good records and keep doing this. Because it's like, I already failed at all my dreams. So it’s fine. This is just all fun and exciting, and yeah, I'm down for whatever.
LOUISE: We're like, “Sure!”
SAM: I think if this had gone down when I was like 23, I would have been like [anxious moaning]. But now I'm just like, “Cool! Great! Yes!” Like we said, I didn't know anything about… We were just playing these shows with these dudes from Australia, Babe Rainbow. It was so freaking fun.
LOUISE: We played just three.
SAM: We played just three. I was like, “Damn, we should do freaking 25 days right now, guys.”
LOUISE: Yeah. But we were also like, “Oh my goodness, we're tired.”
SAM: At the same time, I’m like, “What do you mean there's only Tostitos and beer here?”
LOUISE: Yeah, "We have to stay up past 10:30? OK, we gotta get ready to do that." But no, we're really excited about all of it. I think what's really fun is it feels really… I was just thinking, this is me going cheesy sister mode for a minute, but it's so amazing to do this thing with Sam that we've been doing. Like, “Oh my gosh, we have to play songs together.” When we were kids, we'd be like, “OK, here's the time of the night where we play songs,” because our parents want us to play songs. And it was great. But it feels really awesome to know that other people are coming in. We're like, “Welcome!” But also, this is my brother, and of course we're gonna sing songs. This is how we do it. This is how we hang out and how we live as family together. We make music.
SAM: I guess she's not gonna fire me.
LOUISE: There's something really steady about that that feels really exciting, to have people be excited about and witness. But also, yeah, we were always gonna make a record just because we really want to do that.
SAM: The next one is gonna be a million times better than this.
Love & Devotion is out now on Historic New Jersey. Buy it here.
