Ears Wide Open: Night Shop

Daiana Feuer on August 6th, 2018

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After 20 years drumming in bands, Justin Sullivan has stepped out from behind the kit to embrace his softer singer-songwriter side as Night Shop. Sullivan cut his teeth in DIY punk bands before joining the Babies in 2009 with Kevin Morby and Cassie Ramone. In 2013, that band went on hiatus and Sullivan moved to Los Angeles with Morby, forming a central piece of the live band and appearing on all of Kevin Morby’s records. Meanwhile, Sullivan formed loud and fuzzy punk band Flat Worms with Will Ivy (Dream Boys) and Tim Hellman (Oh Sees), but in 2016, in the middle of a tour, Sullivan reached a breaking point and decided to take a year off the road. That’s when he turned to writing.

“In the Break” is Night Shop’s first full-length album, following a self-titled EP released in 2017 by 1234 Go! Records, and the title refers to that time period. “It reminded me of how it felt when my friends and I were all first getting excited about music,” Sullivan says. “We’d work our jobs and go through the mechanics of life and music was an escape-time we’d steal for ourselves in the midst of the chaos of living and figuring out who we were.”

Out Sept. 14 on Woodsist/Mare Records, the album is a music-family affair engineered by Jarvis Taveniere of Woods, mixed by Drew Fischer — who worked on Morby and Babies records — and features appearances from Anna St. Louis, Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, Will Ivy and Greta Morgan of Springtime Carnivore.

The second single released so far, “This Ship Has Sailed” ruminates on love and coasts gently in its quiet observation of happy-sad feelings and change. “The song is about the necessity of moving on from an obsessive kind of love, but with a spirit of kindness,” he says. “Sometimes I fear there is only a very limited amount of love in the world and if I walk away from a fraught situation, I will be alone forever. I don’t think that’s actually true, but some of that is in the song, too.”

||| Stream: “This Ship Has Sailed”