Sam and Louise Sullivan – Love & Devotion
Today, Philadelphia’s brother-and-sister band Sam and Louise Sullivan share their new single, “Love & Devotion,” the title track from their forthcoming album, Love & Devotion, out July 24th via Historic New Jersey.
Last month, the duo shared “Down on Love,” a “song whose warmth and confidence make bigger stages seem inevitable” (New Commute), which appeared on numerous best-of-the-week/month lists and queued the band up for a breakout performance at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival. The band were invited to join Tweedy (who named Sam and Louise’s 2025 album Sweet Enough one of his favorites of the year) and company on stage multiple times over the weekend, and were many people’s favorite new discovery of the festival. The band will be joining another new fan, Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, when his band plays in Lowell, MA on August 7th.
In contradiction to their lead single, the followup is a paean to love and the ease with which it should come. “‘Love & Devotion’ is our folk-rock wedding song,” explains Sam Sullivan. “It’s fashionable these days to say, ‘ooh, love is so hard; we have to work on our relationship; we need to find compromise, etc.’ No. Wrong. Love should be easy and very fun.” As the lyric goes, “people say it’s hard, but it’s easy.” Sam adds “we were trying to sound as if Kool and the Gang were being played by a band who normally plays contradances and hoedowns.”
Sam and Louise grew up in Oregon, singing various old American and British folk songs that they learned at a school on an old farm on the Tualatin River. Upon moving to Philadelphia, Louise started her own ceramics business and Sam taught high school English. At some point, instead of writing poetry, Sam started writing songs for Louise to sing. Home recordings led to more live shows, so they set out to start a pop band, to try their trad chops on songs in the tradition of the songwriters they loved, like the Roches and Richard and Linda Thompson. This DNA is apparent on today’s single.
Their first EP, Sam and Louise, was made using a USB microphone during the pandemic in between loads of laundry, but upon moving to Philly they met Kevin Basko and Emily Moales, who taught Sam and Louise to use recording equipment and how to switch on the amplifiers. Love & Devotion was stitched together across many late night recording sessions. Kevin forced them to sing through their ramshackle tunes, live and raw, and build out tracks that adhere to their intentional if wobbly cores. They made Papier Mache (2022), their first full-length, on Kevin’s reel-to-reel machine in South Philly. Last year’s Sweet Enough gained traction despite all odds. Playing and recording with friends – Basko (Rubber Band Gun), of History New Jersey, along with Moales (Star Moles) – what they’ve ended up with is a band that wants to make sell-out-the-arena pop songs, but can’t lose its trad chromosomes.
On Love & Devotion, Sam and Louise are trying – and maybe failing, but still trying, or trying in their own way – to go pop. No matter how hard they try, no matter how many digital elements they incorporate, they can’t manage to lose that sweet, old-time feeling.
#samandlouiseband