Whoever said you can’t take it with you never met Evan Sult and Paige Brubeck.
For a decade, their music and arts collective, Sleepy Kitty, made St. Louis its home. During that time, the pair released two full-length albums and an EP, entrenched themselves in the community, and basically did whatever the hell they wanted, much to the city’s benefit.
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Creating visual art across various media, Sleepy Kitty established themselves as local flagbearers of indie cool in the 2010s. With a Cherokee Street print shop that was constantly busy and music that served as their bedrock, the tandem took on a series of pet projects and side hustles that deepened their connections to the city’s creative scene. Brubeck wrote, sang at Jazz at the Bistro, performed two sets at the Gaslight Cabaret Festival, and was the face of Explore St. Louis’ “Nonstop Fun” campaign. Sult, meanwhile, served for a period as editor of Eleven Magazine before signing on as art director for the Riverfront Times.
Free to develop artistically, Sleepy Kitty soon became beloved locally for their live shows and albums filled with Brubeck’s emotive and clever vocals, their driving melodies, and Sult’s seismic drums.
“I think there is a magic to St. Louis,” Brubeck says of their time in the city. “There is openness to people trying things in the arts, and it is an affordable city. I think it allows you to be scrappy and self-made to a certain extent.”
But after a decade in St. Louis, Sult and Brubeck decided it was time for a change. Despite their accomplishments here, the pair yearned for more. Having long held ambitions to live in New York, they left town with Gotham dreams in 2018.
“After 10 rich and rewarding years in a giant art space, playing everywhere we ever wanted with basically everyone we had a band crush on, we realized that we both still harbored a goal of living in New York, a city that we loved touring through and of course lives in legend,” Sult says. “I was working as the art director at the RFT, and I knew from experience that I could work remotely. So, we jumped from a Flatbush apartment-sitting gig into our own Brooklyn lease.”
“We also wanted to pick up on some of the connections we’ve made on tour and connect to New York in specific ways that we couldn’t before we lived there,” Brubeck adds.
Even as fresh Brooklynites, Sult and Brubeck kept tabs on their crew in St. Louis and continued to work on projects here. With those connections intact, the move allowed them to make further musical inroads in the larger, even international scene, and explore ways to expand their sound and reach.
Then, as Sult explains, the pandemic hit, and the pair soon found that New York wasn’t to be their ultimate destination after all.
“Everything got bizarre during the pandemic,” Sult says. “Paige got even more into studying French, and I got super into practicing the drums. After the restrictions eased, we visited Paris to see if Paige’s French would hold up.”
At the last second, Brubeck decided to bring a guitar along for the 2022 trip—a decision that changed everything, Sult explains. The two soon found themselves at an open mic, where Brubeck played Maxime Le Forestier’s “San Francisco” with lyrics in French, and brought the house down. They had such a great time on that first trip that they returned a few months later.
“On that visit, we played a couple of Sleepy Kitty shows, including one with [singer-songwriter] Jeffrey Lewis,” Sult says. “It was exciting to have new goals in a new city and a new language, so though we had no plan of leaving New York, Paris surprised us and swept us away.”
Around the same time, Sult and Brubeck deepened their European connections by releasing their third Sleepy Kitty LP, 2023’s Blessing/Curse, on Norway’s Nordic Records, and by linking up with Sult’s London-based friend Dave Eastman, ultimately joining his group The Open Flames. In 2025 that band released their debut album, Same Time Next Year. Able to switch comfortably from expansive indie rock to layered sonic textures and sounds, the outfit was ideal for Brubeck and Sult.
“He’s been living in London for almost 20 years, and during the pandemic, he reached out with a song called ‘Lockdown’ and I played on it,” Sult says. “And of course, anything I play on, I would love to have Paige play on, too. So he started sending songs, and we were sending stuff back to him…On our second time there, we went into the studio with Dave, and he wanted to get eight songs down in one day, which is not how we work. But we did our best.”
Met with positive reviews, Same Time Next Year further assisted Sult and Brubeck in securing a foothold in Europe. Their trips abroad profoundly affected the duo who, like thousands of artists before them, felt inspired by the experience. Looking for something new, Sleepy Kitty took another big leap and moved to the city with which they’d become enchanted. Just four years after visiting on a lark, Brubeck and Sult obtained their French visas in January 2025. They have been living primarily in Paris ever since.
Filled with creative energy from their new environs, the pair soon formed yet another project, The Tommy Crystal. According to Brubeck, she and Sult had already started writing new material at the time, even while wrapping up their third Sleepy Kitty Record. Pandemic-era demos felt worth pursuing, but perhaps not as Sleepy Kitty.
“I felt like it was time for a different name, because the move to New York felt like a new chapter. We were doing things differently and felt that these songs would be impossible to play as a two-piece,” Brubeck says. “We were keeping things in the experimental phase, because I didn’t want to get tripped up thinking about what it was supposed to be, rather than what it was. That’s how Sleepy Kitty started as well. There’s that magical time when you’re a new band where no one knows you exist, and it’s just you and your collaborators trying to make things you like and impress each other. Evan and I were doing that again without thinking about whether it was Sleepy Kitty or something else. We just wrote new songs and played some of them in Sleepy Kitty sets, but also in Paris we met some new musical friends that we ended up collaborating with, and they helped bring some of the songs to life.”
Now fully formed with an expanded lineup, The Tommy Crystal’s labors have so far resulted in two singles, the indie banger “Reservations” and the more nuanced “Coney Island,” and the band has kept a live schedule that’s seen them perform in each of the cities they’ve most recently called home.
Despite the distance and the ever-expanding slate of projects, Sleepy Kitty again felt the tug of St. Louis via an exciting opportunity with Upstream Theater. Although they regularly create artwork for each of the company’s productions, the duo expanded their role with the U.S. premiere of The End of the World Cabaret, which ran at The Marcelle this past April and early May, with Brubeck taking on the challenge of composing music for the production.
“Evan was working on the design for this show and was reading the play. He knew they wanted to work with a musician because there were songs listed for parts in the show. He thought that I could do it,” Brubeck says. ”I read it and knew they needed a composer. So, I reached out to Lizi Watt, the director. Luckily, she was interested in working with me.”
Having collaborated with the company a decade prior for their show The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Brubeck embraced working with Upstream Theater again in this similar but different context.
“Unlike the Sleepy Kitty music for that program, this was going to be something where I was not going to be in the band—Sleepy Kitty was not going to be the band. These were going to be songs written to hand off to the actors, the music director, and the director,” Brubeck says. “That was exciting, because I was writing the music knowing I wasn’t going to be performing it, and it would be more the director’s vision what happens with it on stage.”
Upstream’s run of The End of the World Cabaret was ultimately received warmly by audiences and critics alike, with BroadwayWorld noting Brubeck’s music “undulates and buffers the ensuing mayhem” and Ladue News dubbing her efforts “zesty tunes.” The show wrapped on May 3.
With their myriad projects in full swing and a renewed interest in taking on challenges that stretch them creatively, Sult and Brubeck have taken the vibes they felt in St. Louis with them to Paris, where they continue to play live with musicians they’ve found and befriended while working diligently on new material.
With no geographical boundaries to hold them back, Sult is excited about the future.
“Right now, our horizons feel wide open,” he says. “They are uncharted territory filled with our experienced adventures. I feel good about walking into this wilderness together.”
