Tender mercies / Photo copy
Today: Writer and artist S.I. Rosenbaum, and Tod Seelie, photographer and author of BRIGHT NIGHTS: Photographs of Another New York.
Issue No. 610
Andrew Sa: American Rough
S.I. Rosenbaum
Secrets of a Famous Meme Revealed
Tod Seelie
Andrew Sa: American Rough
by S.I. Rosenbaum
“I don’t care if you don’t think I’m country / it’s at the heart of me,” sings Andrew Sa. He is a singer-songwriter working in the idiom of country music, a genre long coded as politically conservative. But “Under You,” the opening track on his debut album, American Rough, is a blissfully erotic, submissive anthem that fairly tingles with aural afterglow; Sa begs in a liquid contralto for a lover to “let me stay a nickel in your fountain.”
So I was not prepared to hear that this song was written by a straight guy.
Sa and his friend, the musician Liam Kazar—an avowed heterosexual but a fellow “tender heart,” according to Sa—had planned a songwriting retreat; Kazar arrived with “Under You” in hand. He’d written it for Sa.
“I think he really wanted to help me,” Sa told me by phone from his adopted hometown of Chicago. “He wanted me to have material that was my own.” Kazar also co-wrote Sa’s earlier single, “Little Lamb,” a song that Sa has called his “mission statement.”
I’m not a mountain lion
I’m not a grizzly bear
I’m just a soft little lamb
And I don’t care If you know I bottom
That’s not my cross to bear
But country really is at the heart of Sa—he fell for it early: his father worked as a country session musician, his mother was a Reba McEntire devotee, and his earliest singing gigs were crooning Patsy Cline standards as a crowd-warmer at his mother’s California karaoke joint.
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