New York's Scrappiest Rock Band Glows Up

For the three musicians in Sunflower Bean, the pandemic unlocked a new sense of freedom

- SIMON VOZICK-LEVINSON

SUNFLOWER BEAN

In the spring of 2020, Julia Cumming felt lost. The pandemic had just shut down live music, disrupting countless livelihoods, and for Sunflower Bean — the New York rock trio with such a ceaseless commitment to performing in bars, clubs, and theaters that they were once named the city’s hardest-working band by a local listings site — it hit with particularly dizzying force.

“Those first 10 weeks were bleak,” says Cumming, Sunflower Bean’s bassist and one of two lead singers in the band. “So much of my self-worth was based on being a performer. All the parts of myself that I liked. Having that removed was like an identity crisis.”

Stuck at home in Manhattan as the virus raged outside her door, she didn’t know where to begin. Neither did Nick Kivlen, the band’s guitarist and co-lead vocalist, who hunkered down with his parents on Long Island and gave up on ever touring again.

“I was like, ‘Well, I had a really crazy early twenties, and I’m glad I got all those experiences,’ ” says Kivlen. He compares the feeling that followed to “an ego death: ‘I don’t really matter at all. My art doesn’t matter.’ ”

Olive Faber, the band’s drummer, spent the early weeks of 2020 wrestling with a deeper existential question at her Brooklyn apartment. By the time lockdown began, she was on her way to realizing that the male identity she’d been living uneasily with for years was all wrong. “The pandemic truly gave me the time to sit with myself, and try to figure out who I am offof tour,” says Faber. “And in that time, my egg cracked. I realized I was trans. I am trans.”