Pittsburgh-based songwriter and poet Sara Renberg returns later this week with a new album, Butch Spring, on the ever-reliable Antiquated Future Records. It’s the follow-up to 2018’s Night Sands, a record we described as “beguiling lo-fi pop songs [about] advancing into adulthood proper […] equal parts funny, wistful and tender.”
Butch Spring is “about being humbled by a mid-30s identity crisis,” Sara Renberg explains, “and the confusion and joy that results,” something first single ‘Will You Will Want Me’ introduces perfectly. “As soon as I let myself want what I wanted,” Renberg sings at the beginning, “I knew what I wanted.” And what they wanted, it soon becomes apparent, is to not wear lipstick and vintage dresses, to take on the appearance of someone feminine just to fulfil a role.
Renberg’s writing is as impressive as ever, approaching deep personal feelings and epiphanies with a sense of playful, deadpan poetry that you might expect from Malkmus or Berman. Which here entails a perfectly sketched bar scene (“On Saturday nights, the dykes from the suburbs all cluster by the door / And the jock girls play pool and they hog the jukebox, but stay off the dance floor”), and a love interest described as looking like both “a genderbent Elvis Pressley” and “a butch James Dean.”
The song feels like a distillation of the album’s entire message, capturing that sunshiney springtime feeling of finally being yourself, and the green shoots of new possibilities the feeling brings. But it’s tempered too by uncertainty and the fear of change, particularly the fear of how that change will be received by others. Ultimately, it all comes down to the song’s central question (and its final line): “Will you still want me if I stop trying to be what you want?”
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Butch Spring will be released on the 5th March and you ca get it from the Antiquated Records Bandcamp page.
