smush Had a Lot of Fun Covering Field Medic

Emily Borrowman and Atley King are the Brooklyn-based shoegaze duo smush; Kevin Patrick Sullivan is a LA-based folk musician who performs as Field Medic. On their new covers EP, standards, smush cover the Field Medic song “henna tattoo.” To celebrate the release Emily and Atley got on Zoom with Kevin to chat about it, and much more. 
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music

Emily Borrowman: We’re really excited to talk to you. I have lots that I want to ask you about.

Atley King: Yeah, I’m glad we could do this on Zoom. I know they won’t see the video, but it’s nice to see you and get to actually meet.

Kevin Patrick Sullivan: Hell yeah. It’s a pleasure to be here. I was really excited when I first heard your guys’ version of the song. I was like, This is so cool. So I’m really stoked that it’s finally about to drop. And I love that you titled the EP standards. To be to be among the standards is very cool. 

Emily: I’m so glad that you like it.

Kevin: When I considered doing a covers release, I was going to call it Under The Influence Of… But I think standards is way tougher than that. And I love how all the songs sound like they’re made by you guys. You managed to take all these songs that are very different from each other in their original form sound extremely cohesive as a release. You guys should be proud.

Atley: That means a lot. 

Emily: You’ve been doing music full-time for a long time, haven’t you?

Kevin: Yeah, I used to work at a Peet’s Coffee until the very end of 2015.

Emily: That’s so awesome. Over 10 years!

Kevin: Yeah. And then my best friend Derek [Ted] moved to LA — we both used to live in San Francisco — and he was like, “You need to come here.” And I was like, “OK.” So I just quit my job and I lived on his couch for, like, two years. Full hobo. I just kind of hoped that it would work, and it’s crazy — I was just realizing the 10 year thing the other day, because I was like, Damn, I haven’t had a real job in 10 years. You just gotta be hella frugal. That’s my biggest tip. I’m Mr. Frugal, I never buy anything unless I need to. Derek is an engineer and he’s like, “Bro, you need to buy a mic.” And I’m like, “No.” And he’s like, “Bro, you’re literally a professional musician and you won’t spend $400…”

Atley: That’s an expensive mic! Dang, dude.

Emily: Yeah, we’re kind of an anti-gear band. I just got my first ever pedal board for my bass.

Atley: We’re speaking less than an hour after we opened a Sweetwater box, talking about us as an anti-gear band. [Laughs.] I think fundamentally, though, we are.

Emily: People ask me what pedals I play with and I’m like, “I just plug into the amp.” I tune my bass at soundcheck, put it away, and then whatever it sounds like when I plug it into the amp at the show, that’s what it sounds like.

Kevin: That’s the tone… Did you record the EP on GarageBand?

Emily: No, that one was on Logic. But it’s all computer music. We’re going back to band music now, but it was a really fun detour to do computer music.

Kevin: So are all the drums on the EP samples?

Atley: Actually, “henna tattoo” is a cool one because that one has a sample of a kick and a snare, but the cymbal that’s riding in the verse is live recorded.

Emily: This is the hack.

Atley: For the Tascam stuff — because I know you’ve done a lot of that — I love to record just on one track whatever you’re playing along to for the kick and snare, and then go back later and bounce it down with an actual cymbal. That’s all the human feel you really need for it to have a little bit of life to it.

Emily: It was kind of how we figured out our way of blending live drums with sampled drums, too, because it can be so clunky to put it all together. 

Kevin: I think that’s really smart with a cymbal, because I feel like drum machine kicks and snares sound cool, but digital cymbals are super… it’s a very distinct use case. If you want to give it the human vibe, add the cymbal. Or sometimes I’ll add a tambourine, which is just a bunch of cymbals. I was listening to the EP yesterday and I thought all the drums sounded really cool, so good job.

Emily: Yeah. Obviously the breakbeats are all breakbeats. It’s funny, we posted a clip of one of them on TikTok, and we were getting all these comments that I think were supposed to be a little derogatory. They were like, “me when I use Gross Beat.” I was like, “What is that?  Everybody’s trying to clock us for using Gross Beat.” And I looked it up and it’s a FruityLoops beat.

Kevin: Yeah, it’s a plugin that every rap producer uses to slow down and speed up things. That’s hella funny. I also use Logic, but I make trap beats in my spare time and every single “behind the beat” on whatever YouTube channel, the producer’s like, “So, I pulled up this sample, I put it in Gross Beat…” Like, every single beat that is bomb has been run through Gross Beat. So I think it’s a compliment that they would say that.

Emily: Maybe we should be using Gross Beat. I was reading it as them being like, “Oh, another person using Gross Beat, how original.” And I was like, “Guys, I don’t know what that is.”

Atley: “You think I would touch FL with a 10-foot pole?” [Laughs.] No, I actually should learn how that thing works.

Kevin: I tried to learn FL because there’s something about the 808s and the soft clipper that hits harder, and I just couldn’t because I’ve been on Logic for 10 years. I feel like the best DAW is just the one that you know how to use. But I wish I could use FL, because I swear, the beats just sound harder coming out of that program.

Emily: I’m dying to ask you about your history of rapping. Maybe I was overthinking this a little too much, but I wasn’t sure how much knowledge of you was appropriate to come into this with, because I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. 

Atley: Are we getting into Nardwuar territory?

Emily: [Laughs.] I read online that you were rapping for a period, and then I couldn’t find any evidence of the rapping.

Kevin: My rap project is called Paper Rose Haiku. I actually I just dropped an EP last December, so I’m actively rapping. I literally dream every day of just becoming a rapper — I was a rapper first, when I was in high school. I grew up in the Bay area and I made hyphy rap. It was a joke, you know? But I used to rap battle people… I guess it’s actually not really fair to say I was a rapper first; I was rapping because it was funny, and then I started playing acoustic music. But I literally have a Tupac tattoo. It says “Better Days.” Recently, I’ve only been listening to, like, Lil Durk and Moneybagg Yo. I just love rap because I’m a very lyrical person. I love the stories that they tell and how the song is about the words, which is not always the case in pop music or indie or whatever. Sometimes it’s more about the melody than the words.

So I started rapping again. I’ve always had this fantasy of just becoming a rapper, and I still do to this day. I kind of retired during Field Medic. And then in COVID, I became friends with a bunch of people that were making — this was a little bit after emo rap, but they were producers from the emo rap era. I started working with my friend Jonah [Kramer], who goes by Fantasy Camp. I was like, “Bro, let’s just make a song. I’m ready.” Because I got super, super, super into Bladee at that time, and I felt like I could see from listening to a lot of Bladee how I could also rap, or make music on rap-inspired instrumentals. And then Jonah and I did a song called “Black Metal Long Sleeve,” and then I just was obsessed. That was what I did over COVID: just drink hella White Claw and kratom and make hella rap songs.

Emily: [Laughs.] Not the kratom…

Kevin: No, the kratom is crazy. I do not recommend it. I have a song called “Kratom and White Claw.” I didn’t release it for a long time because I was worried that some young person would think that it was telling them to do it, and I really don’t think they should. 

Emily: Fuck kratom. 

Kevin: Yeah, fuck kratom. But, yeah, that’s where it all started. Then I put out an album in 2023 called Magic Trick, and then I kind of put out one Paper Rose Haiku release a year. It’s just so fun. I’d say Field Medic is very, very personal and generally keeping it 100 about what’s actually going on in my life. And with the rap alias, I’m able to speak about the way that I feel but in a more flex way, or sort of take the emotions that make me emo and then somehow be arrogant about them, and it just feels good. It feels good to let myself be ridic, for lack of a better word. Also, I love producing. It’s super fun.

Emily: I feel like what I’m hearing from you is that you get to be playful about your really serious emotions.

Kevin: Yes, that’s the best way to put it. And also just kind of be braggadocious and boisterous in ways that I’m not really.

Emily: That’s so funny. You finally get to give yourself your flowers. You’re joking, but maybe [you’re not]…

Kevin: No, literally. That’s exactly what it does for me. And it’s also nice because Field Medic is my career at this point, so it can be stressful at times to compose music. It’s nice to have a project that’s just not serious in that way, and I can just feel good about it regardless of what happens.

Emily: Yeah. We’ve had a few iterations of some random side projects and every single one of them is always really light hearted. Just because we take smush so seriously. Like, that’s our life.

Kevin: Right. And you guys are married?

Emily: We are, yeah.

Kevin: And you’re in a band. So it literally is your life, at all times.

Emily: All the time. I mean, it’s often the last thing we talk about before we fall asleep, in the same bed, every night.

Atley: The first thing in the morning. 

Emily: Yeah. And then, of course, we both have day jobs that happen in the evening. So our mornings are all smush, and then we go to work, and we’re texting about band stuff while we’re at work — as much as we can. I’m not allowed to use my phone at my job. I get home at midnight, Atley gets home at, like, 2, and then it’s like, “OK, now we have to lock in for a few minutes and figure out our morning tomorrow before we both go to work again.” I mean, part of it is a symptom of living in New York, too. You can’t stop. It will crush you if you stop. 

Kevin: This brings me to a question for all the smush heads out there: What can they expect next after the standards EP? What we got on the horizon?

Emily: We’re going back to band music.

Atley: We’re going into the studio with a great producer.

Emily: Yeah, we can’t wait… Recording music is so fun.

Kevin: It’s so fun. 

Emily: I love doing it, and to think about doing it again is so exciting. I just had the best time ever recording our first album and going to a studio. Doing the stuff at home was also really fun for the EP, but now we’re going to do it with a band again and have real drums and sit and shape songs together instead of just, you know, laptop, headphone vibe. Which is also fun. But I’m in this to be a band. That’s what I want out of music: I want to be in a band and do it with a band. 

But, yeah, we have a concept record coming. We’ve been sharing stuff about it at shows. I wrote a short story and it’s going to come out with the album and they’re both the same narrative as you listen through. We haven’t recorded it yet and it’s hard to explain. I don’t know what it’s going to sound like yet. [Laughs.] 

Kevin: The smush heads can rest assured that there’s good shit on the way. Next level shit, perhaps.

Atley: How about on your side. What’s coming?

Kevin: I tend to put out something every year, so I am cooking… I would say some sort of album is coming out at some point, probably in the fall. I made this record when I was really deep in the Paper Rose rap world — I tried to make a Field Medic album that had 808s and beat tags on it and stuff. I liked doing that, but I feel like it wasn’t 100% successful for what I was going for, so I’m kind of exploring that again but trying to actually deconstruct beats that I produced digitally and recreate those elements acoustically. So like playing a synth line on a banjo, replacing an 808 with a real bass. I’m still trying to capture that feeling of listening to, like, a hella sinister trap song, but in folk format. I’m like a mad scientist in my lab just trying to fuse these two genres.

Emily: You’re on the precipice of an invention, I feel like.

Kevin: Yeah, I’m trying to invent right now.

Emily: Because people have tried to meld hip hop and folk music before. I feel like people usually get clowned on.

Kevin: Right. It’s a dangerous place to go.

Emily: But I have a lot of faith in you.

Kevin: I remember when I made the “henna tattoo” beat, I was like, This is actually a banger. That’s what I’m looking for, but next gen, more 3D soundscape. I feel like “henna tattoo” has that somewhere deep in its DNA, the attitude that I’m looking for.

Atley: That’s really funny too, because when I was working on the track, for some reason something just called to me on the chorus — I was like, “This needs 808s and trap hats.” I didn’t do a super intricate roll on any of the hat stuff, but I was just like, “Something is in here that needs to be there.” It’s really interesting how that revealed itself to me without really knowing that much about this side of your artistry and music. But even that original beat, definitely there’s a lot of nuance in the way that you constructed the drum part. When I first found that song, I loved that about it specifically.

Emily: That was also what was so fun about making the covers, really deconstructing all these songs. Yours was such a fun one to do.

Kevin: I was just going to say, the sound that’s like a crash that’s been all the way detuned: that, to me, is the toughest part of that drumbeat. There is a snare as well, but the way I did it was — it’s on a Korg Volca Beat, and I had one sequence that had the weird, spooky crash sound, and then another sequence that had the snare. I guess actually the crash was on the three, where the snare would be, and the snare was doing a different rhythm. But, yeah, it’s all that box. The Volca Beat’s got crazy sounds. 

Emily: I’m sure you can tell. Hopefully not uncomfortably, that we’re big fans of you. So this was really special for us. I can’t extend enough gratitude to you for taking the time to chat with us.

Kevin: It’s my absolute pleasure!