“I’m trying to offer something that’s a little more personal and warm,”
Andrew Sa explains, referring to his album artwork from his latest album, American Rough. Throughout his debut album, Andrew delves into queer love in an alt-country setting. death of a rabbit had the pleasure to interview Andrew on his album and the thought process behind it.
Andrew Sa will be performing in Los Angeles August 22nd at the Lodge Room opening for Johnny Fritz.
DEATH OF A RABBIT: How are you?
ANDREW SA: I’m great. I’m so great!
DEATH OF A RABBIT: You recently had a show in Los Angeles at the Zebulon. How was it?
ANDREW: It was really amazing. The room was full. So many faces that I had never seen before. Greeting them at the merch table, it was so amazing to be able to take what I do and what I’ve done here in Chicago for so long and bring it out there and have it work and be well-received.
DOAR: Absolutely! And where are you playing in Los Angeles at the end of August?
ANDREW: The Airliner for the School Night event and the Lodge Room for the Neon Moon event!
DOAR: How do you feel about those shows, especially since it’s not centered around your project? Are you excited to explore new avenues with that?
ANDREW: Yeah, absolutely! For both of those gigs, I’m an opener, so it feels like a little less pressure, which I like. One of them I’m gonna do with just my guitarist, so it’ll be a little more intimate. I feel like I’ve broken through the seal of Los Angeles, so it’s not gonna feel as stressful as that first time, which I got nervous about because I had never played Los Angeles before.
DOAR: That’s good. Now that you have a quick turnaround for it being fresh in your memory, that’s amazing!
ANDREW: The most exciting thing now is: what am I gonna wear?
DOAR: For death of a rabbit, we did a portrait session with you and we discussed a couple of things during it. I wanted to mention your use of Polaroids because we did exclusively Polaroids, but also what do they mean to you? Because you have a little bit of history with them and it’s kind of your thing.
ANDREW: When I was working on the American Rough album artwork, I was really captivated by the Polaroid work of Robert Maplethorpe and it got me thinking about Polaroids in a very personal way. I think about how there’s just the one Polaroid because it’s an immediate exposure. It can oftentimes be a very secretive thing, a very personal thing that you can keep tucked away in a drawer or a jewelry box, a memory that is private. Coupled with it being so warm and acoustic, if you will, if photography could be acoustic, it just has a life to it that I feel like digital photography does not. I think the warmth works well with the kind of music that I make too. I’m trying to offer something that’s a little more personal and warm.
DOAR: I feel like we do see the warmth coming out of the photos we ended up taking, and what comes to mind are the words “vintage” and “timeless,” which might resonate. I don’t know, it’s such a classic, and country is such a classic too, you know? So I really think it suits your vibe.
ANDREW: It’s so “it is what it is” or isn’t; it’s gonna happen or it doesn’t. You only get that one shot. Not to belabor this, but I do think about queer history with polaroids. I think about it in that very private way I mentioned earlier, where it could be a photo from a time when those things were maybe even illegal to possess.
DOAR: Queerness in country music, how do you think it’s placed now? There must be a big history surrounding it, but now that it’s more accepted, not just queerness but queerness within country–country is very much storytelling and it’s very heteronormative, with “my wife” or something of that nature. I was wondering about your thoughts and how you attribute your queerness within country.
ANDREW: It’s definitely something that’s on a lot of people’s minds. You’re absolutely right though. When I was younger and loved country music before I took a long break from it, I couldn’t help but notice how gendered it was. It was very much us against them in terms of gender; if it wasn’t one talking about the other gender, it was the other talking about the other gender. So there wasn’t a lot of room for gay stories, or rather we had to make that room. To speak to its history, there was Patrick Haggerty and Lavender Country from the ‘70s, but they never took off. It was like a flash in the pan. And then there was Katie Land in the ‘80s, it’s always been around.
What I will say is, queer country music as an umbrella, or even as a genre, is still being defined. It’s still so new and I know many different queer country musicians who have such a different perspective and a different sound, and it’s really hard to quantify as of now. I do think that country music, in terms of a genre, is maybe the last frontier to queer because it’s been so gendered, which makes it a little more fun.
DOAR: It’s nice to see it from the perspective of it being the last frontier, like let’s get into it! It’s so exclusionary, gender-wise for example, when it doesn’t have to be.
ANDREW: I feel like what I try to do and what I’ve tried to do with this record is to place myself within it and not beat down the doors, but to just insert myself into it.
DOAR: Absolutely, because it’s also a big role taking on being defined as queer and country when it’s more than just that. It should be more so you happen to be queer and country versus it being the defining factor. It’s also scary to be like, “You’re the representation now.”
ANDREW: It’s very cool to have other people, like Orville Peck, who are very openly queer and country. I feel like none of us are alone. I feel like none of us have to be the one carrying the proverbial torch. We can all do it together.
DOAR: I also wanted to talk about alt-country, because that’s the genre you’re in. Where does the “alt” play into it? Because I see more country and folk than I do alternative. On a grander scale, alt-county and alt-folk are such big movements now. How do you feel placed in this pioneering genre?
ANDREW: Thematically, at least in terms of the queerness of the music, meet some of that indie rock production that we stumbled upon throughout the progress on songs towards the end of the record. Alt-country felt like a much easier way to talk about the record than to say it is specifically country.
I’m inspired by many different things, many different genres. I prefer to say that the music is cosmic American music, which is kind of lofty-sounding when I say it out loud. But it’s something Graham Parsons coined. It’s the beginning of what we now know as cosmic country music, but ultimately cosmic American music is really just the blending of so many different genres. So it is country, but also folk, blues, soul, R&B, and gospel, and it has those influences throughout the whole record. Some people have even been calling me progressive country, which is something totally new that I’ve never heard before. But ultimately, the genre is chosen by the people. I don’t feel like it’s something I can easily say, “this is what I am,” because I don’t know. It feels like genre ultimately is something that is put upon you.
DOAR: I feel like alt-country invites a broader audience and gives more of a forgiveness to it; when I ask people what music they listen to, they say:
- “Everything!” and
- “but NOT country!”
I’m like screw y’all! Y’all like folk but not country? Where do you think it comes from? They have such a boundary or wall placed upon country. So I feel like alt-county makes it seemingly more accessible, where people are so against the country genre in general.
ANDREW: You’re not wrong! Do you know how many people come up to me after a gig and are like, “I hated country, but you changed my mind!” That speaks more about what popular country is today.
DOAR: When they envision country, they don’t envision the classics; they envision pop country, the specific type that we’d hear on popular radio in the 2010s. It’s just so frustrating for people to pigeonhole it into that when it has a rich history and everything.
I also wanted to talk about the production on American Rough, which we talked a little bit about during your portraits. Name drop the women who helped you produce this and create the album!
ANDREW: My lead producer is H.C. McEntire, who is a brilliant singer-songwriter out of Durham, NC and she is queer. I like to say that her masculinity and my femininity balance each other out. She’s a brilliant poet and she helped me on quite a few of the tunes. Our other producer, who also engineered and mixed the record, her name is Missy Thangs, and she is a real badass of a person.
Together, the three of us really gave each other the space to feel, to think, and to grow individually, but also together. We anticipated each other’s needs. We really left our egos at the door. I feel like it was such a mutually supportive experience. No one was trying to prove anything to the other. I felt like we could cry, we could dream, and we all worked so hard to make it the best that it possibly can. I’m just so grateful for them.
DOAR: I wanted to specifically talk about “Your Whisper” because I adore the lyricism on it, like “your whisper swimming in my ear,” and “your whisper reaching for the ceiling.” The personification of the whisper, I just eat it up. I love how it feels.
ANDREW: Thank you. That song was about capturing a very specific moment of making love in a summer rainstorm in Chicago, listening to Chet Baker, and it was very visceral. I was really trying to put the listener in that space in a way that I was, instead of telling it, painting it. I was really inspired by the poetry of Ocean Vuong at the time, and also the music and lyrics of Joni Mitchell. That song’s really special.
DOAR: What’s an underrated song off the album that you don’t feel like gets its flowers?
ANDREW: I gotta be honest, I’m very happy with the reception. People tell me every now and then their favorite song and I’m just so happy to hear that because I don’t hear that very often. To answer your question, I don’t think there is, I’m just really happy with the reception!
DOAR: death of a rabbit likes to focus on lyricism and poetry — I was wondering, what’s a lyric that you’ve listened to lately that you really enjoyed, or what’s a lyric that you wish you’d written?
ANDREW:
I got a way of
Fallin’ in love
With angels that don’t shove
You into thinkin’ that you are committing a sin
John Prine, “Bad Boy”
Enjoy Andrew Sa’s debut album here!
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