Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s latest is a patchwork of new and old material with some gorgeously off-the-cuff strummers and unvarnished folk songs that start to detail his curious shape as a singer-songwriter.
About three months ago, Kevin Patrick Sullivan posted two songs to SoundCloud under the name Paper Rose Haiku—a Kratom-influenced alter ego that he described as “a cowboy [crying] through AutoTune over a trap beat.” Newly sober, Sullivan considers Paper Rose Haiku an anomaly, a demon that emerged during an unfortunate relapse, existing only to be exorcised. In truth, it’s more of an inversion of what he’s been doing for years under his more well-known moniker of Field Medic. Frequently shirtless, flamboyantly mulleted, and aligned with emo-rappers like Bladee and Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Sullivan often sings of the acute sadness that follows when pills and sex fail to keep his baseline sadness at bay. He just does these things in an astringent, high-lonesome wail over fingerpicked, open-tuned acoustics, captured on hissing 4-tracks—a clash of both the authenticities and affectations of purist folk and SoundCloud rap. Floral Prince is the first Field Medic release Sullivan attributes to the “full-time freestyle” approach encouraged by his therapist—and like Paper Rose Haiku, “full-time freestyle” isn’t so much of a break with his past, just a cooler way to describe what he’s been doing all along.
A patchwork of unreleased material, previously available singles, and his YouTube “field medic show,” Floral Prince is functionally similar to 2017’s Songs From the Sunroom, a compilation that marked his signing to Run For Cover and included self-explanatory songs like “do a little dope (live)” and “fuck these foolz that are making valencia street unchill.” Despite Sullivan wanting to sidestep the pressure of making the follow-up to his proper debut, 2019’s fade into the dawn, Floral Prince isn’t noticeably different in its content or fidelity. Horns seep into the mix of opener “-h-o-u-s-e-k-e-y-z-” like ink into water, maintaining fade into the dawn’s pleasing mix of orchestral frill and lo-fi ingenuity, while the live percussion of “HEADCASE” is produced to sound like the drum machine pitter-pat of “henna tattoo.”
Floral Prince’s immediacy comes from a nexus of improvisation and strict ground rules—minimal rewrites, recorded to 4-track or a phone, usually with a limit of three takes. But Sullivan’s too much of a formalist for Floral Prince to ever go fully “based.” The songs that would seem like the result of his first-thought best-thought policy—i.e., the ones where he talks in very plain terms about his bodily functions, drinking habits, and sex life—are the ones where Sullivan’s writing fits into more of a structural grid. “i want you so bad it hurts” and “it’s so lonely being sober” might be litmus tests for new listeners, even though “I even started doing pushups/And my dick’s harder than ever” is the sort of unvarnished truth that should be heard more often if earnest folk music is meant to be a quotidian artform.
And yet, if Floral Prince has any flaw, it’s that reducing the overall “field medic show” to a collection of songs inherently restricts Sullivan’s personality from fully coming across. About half of the album consists of gorgeous, off-the-cuff strummers that feature Sullivan’s most poetic writing; they’re also the songs that sound like they could be written by other people. Conversely, “talkin johnny and june (your arms around me)” deftly holds space for Field Medic’s tendencies towards twee and debauchery, a rare instance of a song that taps into Johnny Cash’s life story without resorting to hagiography or caricature. “it’s so lonely being sober” likewise reflects on the assumptions that arise when hard-living artists write about getting clean. People usually expect a newfound clarity and gratitude, not the self-pity that arises when the inspiration doesn’t come immediately and your friends are still out partying because they’re on the same timeline.
Immediately after, “better way” makes the case that he’s moved onto accepting whatever comes next; it feels just as real despite its more universal lyricism, as the best Field Medic songs strive to live in the present, rather than trying to build a universe. “We do whatever we want because we have nothing better to do,” Sullivan jokes to Great Grandpa’s Alex Menne (credited as Pickleboy) before debuting “talkin johnny and june (your arms around me)” on the “field medic show.” As with Songs from the Sunroom and fade into the dawn, Floral Prince doesn’t question whether Field Medic can be done justice by the album format, just whether he needs to in the first place.
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