There's About To Be A Gay Bro-Country Star, And His Name Is Buck
Hear the amazing “Faces” and “Tuesday Night Lights,” which was mixed by Rostam Batmanglij.
“Faces” is probably the first country song to include the words resting bitch face, and definitely the first with In this town there’s only basics/ Hands to the wall, I did fuck them all. Sam Buck Rosen has released music sporadically for nearly 10 years, in styles ranging from lilting acoustic to piano stuff and gruffer almost-punk, but maybe none quite as exciting as his campy new pop-country tunes.
Buck is based in L.A., but he started “Faces” and “Tuesday Night Lights” back when he was living in Provincetown, MA. In an email, he called it “an idyllic gay vacation town at the end of Cape Cod where a lot of guys go to get loose and get lost.” With these tracks, he said, he wanted “to make some country pop and, like, appropriate that bro-country affect to tell all my gay tales from that time: having drunk friends, becoming a loser, small town lovers and rivalries and being a part of a destructive system in a very general way.”
There’s something really enjoyable about hearing a camped-up spin on the Sam Hunt, Thomas Rhett model—the hot, partying quarterback types of country radio’s present—but “Faces,” in particular, works so well because the songwriting is so solid. It’s just such a fun, real song, and Buck seems to know it. “I want to just continue on in the tradition of someone like Lavender Country, who does the genre justice and is also a real freak and just says what’s up,” he said. “On the flip side, I’m a country-pop purist and in that sense I’ll know my work is done when Miranda Lambert picks up one of my songs. A girl can dream!”
An EP is planned for this summer. Background vocals on both tracks were provided by Casey Dienel, aka White Hinterland, and Sam Zimman; Rostam Batmanglij mixed the vocals on "Tuesday Night Lights."