It’s 2026, the handbasket awaits as it’s getting warmer, and Buttercup is still here to be your friend.
Their new album, Send More Yellow, is “an homage to friendship,” said Erik Sanden, one of the band’s co-songwriters, along with Grammy winner Joe Reyes, and all-lower-case-one-named bassist, odie.
“We need kindness, and we need friendship, and we need neighbors.”
For over 20 years, Buttercup’s blend of earnest, soul-baring modern power-rock with 1960s harmonies has delighted audiences in San Antonio and beyond, and earned them a devoted following that sometimes becomes a part of the act.
“We did a show at the Majestic where we went down into the basement, we took the crowd downstairs, and showed them the bowels of the theater, where I planted all my friends like little guerilla musicians, popped up around corners playing songs,” Sanden remembered.
“There’s a playful aspect that we have that I believe includes the audience.”
That word, “play” is paramount in the way Buttercup does business. Sanden said that when the members get together, it’s rarely to work on songs.
“I have this great privilege to have two of my very, very best friends in the world in that band,” Sanden explained. “So I love that we get to say, ‘let’s play,’ you know, as middled-aged men. ‘Let’s get together and play.’”
Buttercup is hitting the stage again this Friday night at San Antonio’s Empire Theatre, a classic venue that Sanden said is “like a dream.” They’ll be playing music from “Send More Yellow,” including new songs like the disco-influenced “Angel Dust,” and “Brian Wilson,” which not only name-checks the late Beach Boy but incorporates elements from the infamous SMiLE album.
“We try our hardest,” Sanden said of his own group’s vocal harmonies. “It’s so fun [to sing harmony], it’s so hard… and it was really lousy at the beginning [of our band], and we’ve gotten better and better.”
The album itself references not only the band’s first LP, Sick Yellow Flower, but the letters of Vincent Van Gogh, according to Sanden.
“Vincent was writing to his brother, and at the end of many of his letters, saying, ‘you have to send more yellow. I’m running out of it,’ because he was just furiously pouring all that golden light and wheat fields, and yellow flowers. Something about it really moves me. We did [this record] about our friendship, and then about universally, about why friendship is so beautiful.”
Buttercup plays at the Empire Theatre this Friday night at 8:00, with opening acts Heavy Love & The Deathray Davies, then in Dallas on Saturday at the Kessler Theater. May brings more shows in Houston, La Grange, San Antonio, and Fort Worth. Find their schedule at:
BELOW: Read our extended interview with Erik Sanden, for those who love the #longreads. We get into the songwriting process, inspiration, and when it feels right to drop the F-bomb. (Hint: not when you're angry.) Edited for length and clarity.
Nathan Cone: So first of all, yeah, let me just ask about the venue itself, about Empire Theatre, about what it's like to play in a big theater like that, compared to, you know, a smaller venue?
Erik Sanden: It's amazing to play in a bigger venue like that, with a bigger stage. Nathan, it's like the dream. I mean, for me, all I've ever wanted is a big, velvety curtain that opens up and then there's lights. It's super fun, and it also enables us as a band to get a little bit more playful on a large dramatic scale. So we are currently constructing certain kinds of props for our theme of anti-toxic masculinity that we're going to be taking to the stage. It's going to be cute and fun and playful in the way of like a kindergarten play… somewhere between the Flaming Lips and a kindergarten play.
Cone: Well, before we came into the studio to start talking, we were talking about The Flaming Lips and about that playful spark that's part of that band. Talk about that aspect of the group, about having that sense of fun and play as part of the performance in the show and connecting.
Sanden: I don't know how much of it is will willful and just emanates from who we are as people. Buttercup as a band… I have this great privilege to have two of my very, very best friends in the world in that band. So I love that we get to say, “let's play,” you know, as middle-aged men like, “Let's get together and play.” And that's what we call it, because we're musicians. And I love that word. It's not work. Sometimes we say work, and that always brings me down, because it doesn't feel like work when, when you've got friends getting into together in a rehearsal space, or as we went down to Mexico several times last year to write songs… it's play, it's cheerful and It's childlike, and we're just making stuff up. And so the live shows come from that. I mean, there's a playful aspect that we have, that I believe includes the audience, in sometimes very interesting ways. We did a show at the Majestic where we went down into the basement. We took the crowd downstairs and showed them the bowels of the theater where I planted all my friends like little guerilla musicians popped up around corners playing songs. It was awesome. And took them onto the stage of the Majestic and showed them what it feels like to be an opening band for a larger band where there's a huge crowd that doesn't want you there. I had planted hecklers in the crowd. It was super fun. And we've done all these kinds of strange shows… so that we're just not doing the same thing over and over. And I think our fan base has come to expect us to do something interesting,
Cone: You've been a part of San Antonio now the music scene for many years, and you've got fans that have kept up with you for lo these many years as well. And, you know, that's a wonderful thing. It keeps things interesting for you guys, I bet.
Sanden: You know, we just did a listening party where we have this new record. It's massive record. It's 18 songs, but we, we did a listening party at this really cool lounge inside of Andy Benavidez’s frame shop, and we sold 20 tickets and 20 tickets only… and we listened to a half dozen songs off the record, and then we performed. And I saw people that had been with us since the very beginning, and then new people and some of them had aged quite a bit, you know? It felt like such an honor to play in that kind of space, a strange space like that, and be able to talk at length about the songs. It was… just sort of a secret little show that was invite only. We didn't post it on the internet. We hand-invited people, and it was, I don't know, it just felt like a culmination, an honor. I mean, we have a friend who's a longtime fan, who's really suffering physically, and, you know, plagued by neurological disorder, and another man who was as well, and it felt incredible to play for them, you know, and to make them happy. It's like something good we can do with our music.
Cone: Well, let's talk about the album, which is “Send More Yellow.” And opens with “Angel Dust,” which is a track that when I first started listening to it, I said, “Oh my gosh, there's a little bit of a disco sound to this!” A little bit of a dance vibe to this track. What's going on here? Can you talk about that, that bold opening?
Sanden: I mean, it, it made us laugh when we were playing with the song. It starts with sort of a chordal structure. And there's a lot of different ways a song can go, and one of those ways is disco, and we were playing around with it, and then odie was clowning. We were we were in Mexico doing the writing for the record, and my friend Brent's beautiful house, like in the east cape of Cabo, and the whales are in front of us slapping the water, and we're just in this awesome place, and odie just started hamming and going hard on the disco bass, and I just felt like it brought such joy to the song. I thought, this is good. Let's do that. And you know, it feels ersatz disco like maybe too much. I don't know, if you own something and you love it, It's never too much. What a joy to play that that song is, and it's a slightly new direction. We've never gone really disco before. There's been some little, tiny bit of dancing this in some songs. But yeah, that that's, that's a lot of fun.
Cone: In general, how do you construct songs?
Sanden: It's a good question. For me, the lyric is a big part of it. Once I get a sense of where the lyric is going, or what it's trying to say to myself and to maybe whoever's listening, then I start to believe in the song more and more. So I have an emotional connection with it, mostly there. But that's not always true. Sometimes there's just a musical piece that that moves me, and I don't know what that is. And you know, we've all felt it where there's a certain movement and structure that just makes you want to cry or smile, and that's nice, too. So I honestly don't know the answer, but I do feel like I'm constantly running back and forth between the word department and the cool sounds department, and sometimes the words have to shift to marry themselves with the musical content. And so that's it's always a compromise going back and forth. It's kind of fun.
Cone: There's another song on the album that name checks a real person, which you've done several times over the course of your albums. And this is “Brian Wilson,” In this case not only are you name checking him, but you're also using elements of [The Beach Boys album] “Smile” itself in the tune.
Sanden: So that's an older song [that we put on this new album]. My love affair with Brian Wilson is long standing, and I've always admired his incredible genius, his ability to construct all these in intense harmonies. And Buttercup, we try our hardest. I mean, we are like Beach Boys, junior grade, but there is a lot of vocal harmony that echoes both the Beatles and the Beach Boys. And we're just trying our darndest. It's so fun, it's so hard, and it was really lousy at the beginning, and we've gotten better and better. It's a joy to sing together. And you hear that in the Beach Boys, for sure. There's a lot of family in that, but Brian Wilson is just his outsider, weirdo genius. It's just, it's awesome. So that song's a love song to him and to his music.
Cone: The three of you guys, you feel like family?
Sanden: Yes, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're weird. We're family.
Cone: I was reading through on your website. And first of all, I want to say I love the rider, as well as the stage plot illustration on your website, which is, you know, far different than you know other bands, writers and stage pots and, you know, just back to the basics.
Sanden: Back to the crayons! Yeah we had a very modern, sleek website for a while that was like sprawled out of control and was kind of broken, and I was in charge of it, and it looked like a band website with a lot of photos, and odie called me complaining, he's our bass player, saying, “When are we playing? I don't know how to use this.” And he came up with this idea, what if there was just a little ear, and you click on it, and then that shows you how you could listen to us, or I and you could see us. And so I took that and ran I drew all these illustrations with just a Sharpie on white paper. And it's very, very simple and basic, but it's pretty cool because it's almost no words at first, but it sprawls. It gets deep. It's a pretty cool website.
Cone: There's a section where you [specify when] playing a show with kids present, please don't ask us to have songs with cursing in it. And I guess what I'm getting at is that in your songwriting, there's not a whole lot of that anyway, you know? Where does that come from? I mean, it's not a conscious choice to be clean.
Sanden: It's becoming that, though it's so interesting, because earlier, we would curse when we felt like we were listening to a lot of music that had curses in it. And so there were songs that were explicit that had these words. And then, you know, as I've gotten older and more and more in love with words, I felt like there's a way to do it without cursing. And so like even Joe has a tendency to curse a little bit more in his songs (which is so surprising), in some of the Demitasse songs, I've given some options that I think are actually more powerful than actually saying the curse word, I don't know. It takes me back to my father, honestly, Nathan. He would never curse out of anger or pain. The only time I've ever heard him curse was when he was full of joy, and that was interesting. So he would not do it… because I think he came from a place that [cursing] would increase the anger, or it would tickle that, or it would exacerbate it and make it worse. So I try to do that when I'm angry. I won't curse. When I'm happy, I let it rip. I think the words are appropriate in their context. There's a real joy. You know, you could say the F word, and in a way, that's the most loving thing in the world, right? Like, you know, I love you, yeah, so much. And that's like, just an extra exclamation point! But in some other context, it could be, like, very, very hurtful, since it could be misinterpreted or whatever. And also, yeah, most of the time we just leave it off.
Cone: That also speaks to the one of the things I love about the music as well, which it's got humor in it, and many of the songs have a heart on the sleeve, earnestness to them as well.
Sanden: I've always loved Jonathan Richman [ed. note, founder of the Modern Lovers], and he, as a singer, has this autobiographical element that he puts in there. Most great songwriters, you feel like you know them when you dive deep into their songs. At least most, it's not the absolute path to be a confessional poet, but it is a path, and that's the path that we've chosen. It's just who we are, and it's who I am. Definitely, as a songwriter, I like to share. Well, it's scary. Sometimes it honestly is scary, but I force myself to do it. I wrote a song called “I Love My voice,” about my struggles with my own voice and disliking it, hearing it…
Cone: Did you write that song as almost a self-affirmation?
Sanden: Oh, yeah. I mean it literally. “I love my voice. I love my…” I say it like 100 times, and then the hook at the end is, is sing it enough times and you'll believe it. Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it. Yeah. I love my voice, but I name check all these other voices that I wish I actually had a vocal transplant, like Neko Case or Ray Davies. John Lennon… George, Paul… they’re all in there.
Cone: Well, one more thing about this particular record, about “Send More Yellow,” you know, you talked about it being this big, sprawling record with 18 songs on it. What makes you go like, this [big record] is what we're doing.
Sanden: I mean, we went, we had a creative burst in the last couple of years, and when we went to Pleasantry Lane, the studios in Dallas, and began to record. You come in with 18 songs, and usually 10 will make it onto a record. And we just thought, we'll just put them all out. We could divide it into two records. But we thought this just feels right, right now. There's a lot going on in our fractured world right now, and a lot of big feelings. And so we just wanted to let it out now. And honestly, as we get older, you never know what's going to happen. We've lost many friends along the way. You were talking about long term friends. We've lost big chunks of our fan base. It's an honor to be able to still do music, so let's do it while we can, and hopefully it'll keep going. I mean, I feel great, I feel young.
Cone: Is there anything we didn't talk about today that you would want to get out there as well?
Sanden: Um, just that the record… why I feel like I love it so much is it's an homage to friendship, and right now, in an environment that's so cruel and highly polarized, we need kindness and we need friendship and we need neighbors like we never have, and so you know this record is… yellow is the color of friendship. It's also a nod to our first record, which was called Sick Yellow Flower. But “Send More Yellow” is like was Vincent van Gogh in his letters, talking to Theo, his brother, his really, deepest friend and one of his few friends.
Cone: And Van Gogh's the album cover.
Sanden: Yeah, he's sort of dissected on the album cover. One of his last paintings, is torn apart and there's holes in it. You can see the pavement coming through. That's done by Chris Sauter, amazing artist. But it's you know, [Vincent van Gogh] was writing to his brother, and at the end of many of his letters saying, “you have to send more yellow, I'm running out of it,” because he was just furiously pouring all that golden light and wheat and fields and yellow flowers. It's just like, really, I don't know, just something about it just really moves me. And so I like it. We did something about our friendship, and then about universally about why friendship is so beautiful.
