<p>On his debut album, “American Rough” out Friday on Bloodshot Records, Chicago serenader Andrew Sa offers a tender ode to love, longing and masculinity with a rich voice and country charm.</p><p>Sa guides listeners through a vast, 10-track sonic landscape dotted with images of clothes thrown on a chair in the heat of passion, boots left by the door, honky-tonking all night long, chiseled jaw lines with horse-tooth smiles, strong arms and thunderbolt bourbon skies.</p><p>Concrete Chicago references surface, too, as Sa becomes a Boystown balladeer “sweeping Halsted like a broom” for men resembling an ex on “You Turned Me On,” and cautioning someone to “take the Red Line and walk away” to cool off on “Fightin’ to be Fightin’.”</p><p>At the center of “American Rough” is Sa’s unique voice, a dynamic, warbling birdsong that coos lovingly, soars confidently and glides mischievously, often delivered at his performances beneath the brim of a cowboy hat and neatly trimmed mustache.</p><p>Scoring this “American Rough” landscape are the bright plucks of a pedal steel, the tremors of a violin, the grounding strums of guitars and the subtle bursts of horns, all melding Chicago’s <a class="Link" href="https://chicago.suntimes.com/2023/4/28/23697755/sundowners-country-music-mark-guarino-book-jethro-burns-curt-delaney-bar-rr-ranch-don-walls-bob-boyd" target="_blank" >storied country</a>, folk, indie, jazz and blues histories, courtesy of a roster of local and North Carolina-based musicians, the two locations where the album was recorded.</p><p>Sa populates “American Rough” with a cast of characters he said exemplifies a “specific breed of tall, gruff, broad-shouldered masculinity.” The album examines his relationship to these characters, his own masculinity and “my desires, how that can be beautiful and blooming, and how that can be destructive and painful,” Sa said. </p><p>It all makes for an ultimately romantic album, as heard on “Your Whisper,” a slow burner that he wrote about his partner of 12 years.</p><p>“That song is absolutely about him and the beginning, the moment of whether or not it’s worth it to commit to love when you’ve been single for so long — the fear and excitement surrounding that,” he said.</p><p>“Your whisper heavy in my hand, true as a golden band waiting for an answer,” Sa sings as his tenor trembles, calling to mind the distinct timbres of Roy Orbison and Angel Olsen, imbued with a warm, k.d. lang-like inflection and down-to-earth drawl.</p><p>“There’s a timelessness to [Sa’s voice]," said H.C.