Until recently, Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s only bandmate in Field Medic was a boombox. On 2017’s songs from the sunroom and 2019’s fade into the dawn, the California songwriter paired his distinctive reedy voice with simple, lo-fi folk guitar and a drum machine. When he performed live, he drove the van and sold the merch himself, setting his specially decorated boombox on a stool to spit out backing tracks while he stood and sang alone. His new album, grow your hair long if you’re wanting to see something that you can change, exchanges the straight-to-tape simplicity of his earlier work for more expansive full-band arrangements.
Across the album, Sullivan delivers new sounds with elevated confidence. The record opens on “always emptiness,” a slice of warm, textural Americana with steel guitars and piano in the mix. “stained glass” introduces sophisticated, almost orchestral flourishes, while “weekends” has a country-rock backbone. Sullivan’s trusty drum machine reappears on “i had a dream that you died,” which sounds like an older Field Medic song with a synthy new tint, and “i think about you all the time,” where the prominent, melodic bassline and wordy yet catchy chorus recall the ’90s guitar pop of singer-songwriters like Natalie Imbruglia.
Though Sullivan worked in producer Gabe Goodman’s studio with backing musicians, as opposed to alone in a bedroom with a tape recorder, these songs sound intimate. There’s a slight increase in fidelity, but Goodman wisely uses a light touch. Directness is important because Sullivan’s lyrics are rawer than ever: grow your hair long… is full of hopelessness and yearning, and the songs are naked, painful documents of just barely getting by. “I wanna fall off the face of the earth and probably die,” goes the album’s opening line. “Recently a lot I ponder suicide, but I could never do that to my mom,” Sullivan sings on “i had a dream that you died.” The plain recording style creates an almost uncomfortable tension when paired with statements like these; it’s unfiltered and disarmingly matter-of-fact.
In the past Sullivan has written with self-deprecating levity, but here he trades it for a purer self-loathing. Some of his most memorable songs—2017’s “uuu,” 2020’s “i want you so bad it hurts”—are addressed to a lover. The only song on grow your hair long… that scans as a love song, “i think about you all the time,” is more ambivalent; Sullivan calls it “a love song to alcohol & younger days.” Yet it isn’t an overwhelmingly heavy listen, thanks to the prettiness and charm of the music. And while Sullivan’s lyricism is straightforward and unflowery in service to its subject matter, his quietly evocative imagery pulls you into its despairing headspace. “My heart’s a dark shroud, your heart is book bound,” he sings on “i think about you all the time.” The line that titles the album, which comes from “house arrest,” is one of its most effective, beautiful in a simple, natural way.
It’s also one of the rare moments on the album when Sullivan seems to look up from the bottom. There’s another such poignant glimpse of light in “i had a dream that you died,” when he repeats, “I had a dream that I saw a blue whale, I was happy.” The music’s layered, thoughtful melodicism gives credence to these lines, transforming them from desperate grasps to purposeful expressions of faith. grow your hair long… doesn’t make peace with anything, yet the honesty it offers is strangely warm.
