ANDREW SA

Andrew Sa’s earliest music memories are of sitting in cars. Crammed together with his siblings in the cab of his father’s ‘86 Ford F150 listening to the Eagles, Reba McEntire, and top-40 country hits, driving around Fremont, California. At home, occasionally, his dad would slide his old Gibson Les Paul out from under the bed, a secret relic from a past life as a touring musician, and play for them while they sang. Years later, after Sa’s mother remarried and started her own karaoke company, Sa suddenly found himself ushered onto stages as a 10-year-old and encouraged to warm up the crowd, a few hits already tucked under his belt. “For some reason I always picked the sad Patsy Cline songs,” an early sign of Sa’s penchant for aching country ballads that would eventually find its way onto American Rough, Sa’s debut album out on June 26 via Bloodshot Records.

While the spark was lit as a child, it took Sa some time to return to the call of classic country. His musical interests shifted to jazz as he became enthralled with the voices of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, and Nat King Cole – influences that continue to ring through his musicianship today. This was also an important moment in Sa’s life for his discovery of musicians like Rufus Wainwright, k.d. lang, and Elton John – openly queer musicians whose outspokenness felt like a doorway to a life of queer performance that Sa hadn’t seen or been able to envision before.  “When I was a teenager, a friend gave me a copy of Rufus Wainwright’s Poses,” he recalls. “And for me it was a revelation. The romance, the beauty, the longing, the raw emotion – it’s so authentic. He gave me permission to dream.” A new future opened up. 

A natural-born and intuitive performer, Sa went on to spend some time pursuing acting and theater in the Bay area before a short stint in Portland, Oregon. It was the alluring prospect of furthering his songwriting education through a class at the Old Town School of Folk Music that finally brought Sa to Chicago’s shore, and blew open the door to a new relationship to folk and country music. In the years that followed, Sa hit the ground running, stepping into a new spotlight. Between 2013 and 2016, Sa performed regularly at queer-focused acoustic showcases and met the collaborators that would come to shape his musical career in Chicago for the years to come: Liam Kazar and Sully Davis. It was Davis who first invited Sa to open for the legendary queer country band Lavender Country at The Hideout and also tapped him for the brilliantly campy music revue Cosmic Country Showcase, started by Davis and Dorian Gehring in 2018. It was largely through Cosmic Country that Sa became a sought-after voice in Chicago’s independent music scene, enveloping audiences with his signature, siren-like croon and delectable charm.