With his debut solo album out next week, Nick Kivlen is finally making music on his terms. In a conversation with photographer Driely S., moderated by editor Jane Lewis, the creatives define success not by numbers but by artistic freedom.
Nick Kivlen has spent the last decade chasing music around the world as a founding member of the band Sunflower Bean. Now, with his debut self-produced solo album, Addicted to the Sunset releasing independently on July 7, he’s turning inward and returning to a homemade creative process. Written, recorded, and produced in the sanctuary of Kivlen’s Los Angeles living room, across the country from his native New York, the record celebrates the small imperfections that remind us of the human hand. The sun-drenched album is inspired by a coastal California road-trip, its nostalgic hum propelling the next phase of Kivlen’s career into something entirely of his own making.
Likewise, Driely S. has always paved her own way. The New York-based Brazilian photographer has long been drawn to analog image-making, carving out a singular visual world. Working primarily in darkrooms, her portraits of musicians feel like unguarded cinematic moments between muse and image-maker. You might recognize the photographer’s work on Sunflower Bean’s 2022 Headful of Sugar album cover, or her portraits of everyone from Beyoncé to Yves Tumor to Jim Jarmusch. And she always thinks outside the box, whether she is writing her first feature film or directing musicians in photo booths, from Kivlen himself to Alison Mosshart from the Kills—you can see works from the latter in the Autophoto museum’s upcoming music-themed exhibition, “On The Record,” which debuts next Friday in New York.
Since meeting in 2020, Kivlen and Driely S. have returned to collaborate again and again. Their friendship is rooted in a shared belief that film and music do not exist in a bubble, but instead drive conversations bigger than mediums. It’s the world—and how we see it—that interests them most. As their conversation winds from Jackson Pollock’s polaroids and David Cronenberg’s psychic abilities to the magic of live music and self-funding films, it becomes clear that there is something radical about slowing down and returning to what makes us human. After all, it’s the heart of their creative practices.
Jane Lewis: How did you two initially meet? And then what made you continue to come back to each other over so many years of friendship?
Driely S.: I was already familiar with your music before we met, and I remember seeing you around South by Southwest years ago.
Nick Kivlen: Yeah, you had taken Sunflower Bean’s photo in, like, 2016. When it came time to do the creative for our third album [Headful of Sugar], it was a match made in heaven. But the very first time we hung out, we went to the Met and saw the Alex Katz show.
DS: I immediately was like, Oh, we speak the same language. I always find that musicians and photographers are chasing a fleeting feeling before it disappears.
NK: You use the camera to document what’s in front of you, but songwriting is funny because it often first involves coming up with nonsense phrases and humming melodies that eventually morph into words and sentences and ideas. It’s generated more from the subconscious.
DS: Exactly. And you have to accept that the first draft might not be perfect and then work through it. This is why collaboration and productive disagreement are so amazing.
NK: For sure. Waking up with the same dream every day is really important too. I naturally have a lot of fun making music and try to be in a headspace that doesn’t have a lot of doubt, so it’s really good that I have my collaborators, like Crista [Simiriglia, manager] and Julia [Cumming, bandmate] to be there to tell me, “No, you need to work more on this.” Now this solo album is the first time that I’ve ever been left to my own devices.
DS: I’ve been listening to a lot of your album, and I find that it sounds so different from New York Nick. I never viewed you as a negative person when you were in New York, but there’s something so radically positive about the songwriting you’re doing now in LA.
NK: I first started formulating what this project was going to be when I took a road trip with my girlfriend Meka [Boyle] after the last Sunflower Bean tour: We drove up to Monterey, where she’s from, and then we went to San Francisco afterwards. I usually start from a place of asking myself, What’s an album that I want to listen to that doesn’t exist yet? And I was, of course, inspired by driving up the California coast. I remember even when I was in high school, all the bands in Brooklyn were very surf-inspired. There was Beach House, Beach Fossils, Wavves, Best Coast; everyone had this very wavy, ’60s psych sound, especially Deerhunter. I’m also glad that you picked up on the major keys and the happier vibes of the record, but I think it still has an underlying melancholy to it, even in the meaning of, “Addicted to the Sunset.”
DS: Your songwriting has this beautiful quality of yearning. There is a very sincere element to it, whereas so many people approach songwriting from a very optimized place, where it almost feels like a formula. You’re also very prolific. How do you decide what to put out?
NK: As an artist, most of the work you make doesn’t end up going anywhere. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you are just creating for yourself. Editing becomes a skill.
DS: I feel that way with photography too. Sometimes I make work and then I just sit on it because there is a part of me that is like, Well I’ve already satisfied the audience of one, which is myself. Why the fuck do I need to show it to anybody?
NK: As a musician, I feel like the only time you ever truly have anyone’s attention is when you’re in the room, in front of them, physically singing.
DS: I don’t think any other art form can make people feel the same way as live music, with everyone together in a room experiencing the same thing. It is really magical… I often catch myself thinking of creative mistakes and how they help determine the next steps. Do you have any mistakes that you made that helped you make this a better record?
NK: My album is completely self-performed, and because of that it’s full of mistakes. I wanted it to have that really wonky production to it. A lot of the music that I love was recorded in the ’60s and ’70s, and it is so messy and so raw. That is something that we’ve lost a lot in modern music production, when everything is quantized and overproduced, with splice loops and now A.I. Sometimes it literally blows my mind to listen to The Rolling Stones and be like, Wow, this was the biggest band in the world and they were putting out this record that has so many flaws to it.
DS: Yeah, everything is so optimized for perfection now. Part of what makes art beautiful is exactly this ramshackle nature.
NK: I was thinking about this album as a folk-art practice. I love folk art—most of the art in our apartment is from thrift stores and estate sales—and I just wanted to really do something that was outside of the industry…
JL: We’re just so inundated all day with this fake, perfect content. Something that I love-hate about A.I. is that it has made us so skeptical of things that are too smooth and too retouched that it’s actually made us revert to loving imperfection: It’s what makes something human.
NK: Even in the photos that Meka and I took for this project, I was like, I don’t care if it’s unflattering, or if I have stubble, or something’s on my shirt. I just want it to look real. I wasn’t afraid of looking ugly.
DS: I don’t think any of those mistakes you mentioned are ugly. They are human, and that’s very important because we’re living in such a weird time in art in general, where we can’t always tell what’s real and what’s not—all we’re going to have are these extremely human mistakes to tell it apart.
NK: More and more, that’s becoming what I’m looking for in art.
DS: I’ve been thinking a lot about how this all relates. I’ve always liked every type of analog thing, and the photo booth is really just a giant camera when you think about it.
NK: There’s nobody there; it’s just you and the camera inside this thing.
DS: Also, back in the day, if you were a gay couple or an interracial couple, you couldn’t really get your photo taken anywhere, and this was the only place where people found any kind of privacy and solace to actually document themselves.
NK: There’s no photographer, and there’s no judgment. There’s no developer even. I love the idea of taking something and using it in a way that it’s not intended—which is a big part of your process in general too.
DS: Yeah, I try to take the limitations and stretch them to see where I can take it. We are living in a time where we have unlimited access to tools and techniques, but I find that when you try to work within a parameter, it actually forces you to think outside the box.
NK: For sure. I remember when I sat for your photo booth series, it was the day after David Hockney had died, so I was trying to take inspiration from his Polaroids. The way he took all these different fractured perspectives and collaged them together feels so true to how we view the world today. It’s like pixels, almost.
DS: Truly. So many of our memories and experiences are fragmented. And I think Hockney found a really beautiful way to visually represent that: All these little squares can each be their own thing, but when you add them up together, you have this one image that reveals something.
NK: I also think it’s cool that the museum is showing all these photos of musicians from the past, because the photo booth strips are the closest things we have to seeing them in private moments. The photo of Arthur Russell is really striking.
DS: I think about him all the time. Most of the images we know of Arthur Russell are from photo booths. I also think a lot about the ones of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe. So many people have used them. There is a very famous photo of Robert Johnson.
NK: Yes! The photo of him holding the guitar.
DS: I think musicians just like being able to have the room to get creative on their own… Can I ask you something about this record? Is there anything that you learned about yourself that you feel like you understand yourself better now that you got these songs out of your system?
NK: I was able to process a lot. Basically, I had just got off a long tour, and all of a sudden I was home, and it was really quiet. I knew that this year was going to be the least busy year for Sunflower Bean we’ve ever had, so I woke up every morning and pretended that I was in a recording studio. I found that I was writing a lot about what I had imagined my life would be like when I was in my late teens and first started the band.
DS: Which is wild because you’re still so young; you just got started really early. Do you ever look back and think, Oh my God, look at young Nick; he would be so proud of himself now?
NK: I think less about the art and more about my life: I really did chase my dreams with no plan B, and this album’s kind of about the ecstasy of that and then the fallout as well.
JL: I’m 24, and it’s really valuable for me to hear you guys recalling the phase of your careers that I’m in now, where I’m like, Oh my gosh, I want to take that leap myself.
DS: I remember being your age and being like, But what’s my style? What’s the thing that makes my photos my photos? The reality is that you don’t figure it out until you get there. And it requires you making a lot of mistakes and failing. My definition of success completely shifted for me around when I turned 30.
NK: How has it shifted?
DS: I’m able to wake up every day and do whatever the fuck I want. I think people look at it from the outside, and all they see is your proximity to fame or money, but that isn’t necessarily important.
NK: I’m the same way. I think success is about your lived experience. I used to think success was about whether you can wake up in the morning and enjoy a cup of coffee without having anxiety about the future. Now I think freedom might actually be learning how to keep making things despite uncertainty.
DS: Was there something that you had to unlearn when you were making the solo album?
NK: I let go of any pressure to make something that would be commercially viable. Now that I’m doing it without those expectations, everything feels like a victory.
DS: I hear you. It doesn’t get talked about a lot, but you do end up becoming a slave to your career and to the industry.
NK: Yeah, exactly. Was there something you had to unlearn?
DS: I’m writing a movie. We’ll see how it goes—I’m scared because I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve wanted to make movies for a long time now, but I bought into this industry idea that if I make music videos, if I build experience with advertising work, then one day somebody’s going to give me a chunk of money so I can do it. We now know that that’s not true. It just becomes a way to make excuses.
NK: I feel like the studios are really looking for singular voices now. I’ve listened to all the interviews with Kane Parsons, the director of Backroom, and I’m obsessed with him. He has a Stanley Kubrick matter-of-factness that I love. I think seeing into the future is one of the greatest gifts an artist can have. Karl Marx basically described late-stage capitalism over 150 ago. As maligned as he is, David Foster Wallace more or less predicted TikTok.
DS: It’s true! I was just watching the [David] Cronenberg movie, eXistenZ [1999], and I was like, Damn this motherfucker was so ahead of his time. It’s all about this idea that we are all living inside of a video game of our own making.
NK: Exactly. That’s why I find NPCs to be one of the most fascinating phrases that Gen Z throws around, because it’s almost like the modern-day superstition, like ghosts. It’s perfect for our detached, sociopathic time, where it’s like: All these people that I see, they aren’t really alive.
DS: They are a sub-plot to our own main stories. There’s so much happening in the world with technology and wars and so many crazy political things, and I find myself feeling guilty thinking, Wow, there’s nobody in our generation making art about this.
NK: Whatever you want to say about the Boomers, a lot of the art that we love from the ’60s and ’70s was about the Vietnam War and all the social movements that were happening at the time. But I’m conflicted. I’m a huge Adam Curtis fan, and I always come back to his argument in Can’t Get You Out of My Head [2021] about how people in the 20th century fell into this trap of mistaking art for political action…
DS: But it can have an impact. We grew up admiring artists who were making work of substance that reflected their times. As much of a cliche as it is, fucking Bob Dylan was so tapped in it is insane. Even Pablo Picasso, as much of an asshole as he was in his day, was doing political paintings.
NK: I mean, he painted Guernica.
DS: As an artist today, you risk the question of: Am I really commenting on anything of value, or am I just full of shit?
NK: On a personal level, we don’t even think about what’s happening in the world today. You know, the U.S. just essentially surrendered to Iran in a war that we started three months ago, and I haven’t heard anyone in my life bring it up.
DS: So much of my career this far has revolved around making work about other people’s work, and this is the first time I’m able to be like, Actually, what the fuck do I want to do? What do I want to say?
NK: That’s so similar to how I felt making my solo music.
JL: I mean, look at someone like Patti Smith: She didn’t start out as a singer, she was a poet and an artist, then one day she was like, “I’m just going to do it.” Starting my magazine [Bias Cut], I was like, “I just have a grant from school, and I’m just going to go for it.”
DS: We need to figure out ways to think and work outside of the system again. More and more now we talk about the industry in this abstract way, but we are the fucking industry, and it’s up to each of us to create the model that we want to see. Then perhaps we can pave the way for other people to follow.
NK: Definitely, and I think the collapse and the loss of power of all these institutions is an opportunity for change.
DS: I’m at that place now, where it’s like, actually why haven’t more people in our generation taken it upon themselves to bring back some shit like Dogme 95 [the Danish avant-garde filmmaking movement co-founded by Lars von Trier]? We have incredible access to technology and can do so much at home. You don’t need a big studio, but what you do need are good ideas.
NK: No production company, no financial backers.
DS: I am so eager to just pick up a camera, even if I have to just shoot myself and my friends.
NK: Well, I’ll be a PA for you.
DS: I’d love you to act on it! This feels like the time where I can finally tap into my community, and be like, What do we wish to see on the screen that we can make ourselves? I just want to make something with my friends.
