“Keep in mind, I’m from Maine,” Tucker Pillsbury tells me, laughing a little. “I was a kid from Maine rapping about cars. So just put that in.”
Today, Zooming in from Orlando before a show, he’s rocking a baseball cap with a little fishing hook on the brim—a sensible choice for a guy with Maine roots. (Or maybe it’s just sunny in Florida.)
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Known professionally as Role Model, the folky, indie-y Americana-y artist has tried on plenty of metaphorical hats before he settled on the cowboy hat on the album cover of Kansas Anymore, the second full-length he’s put out as Role Model after 2022’s Rx.
He’s experimented plenty in his relatively short career. In college, he got into the Pittsburgh rap scene that was exploding thanks to guys like Wiz Khalifa and Mac Miller. But as Pillsbury puts it now, it felt weird, definitely ingenuine.
While he jokes about rapping about cars, he gets real when he talks about how he dealt with depression at the time.
“I became the most reclusive I’ve ever been at a certain point, probably because I was going through it,” he says. “I was just alone in my room, experimenting with music. Not so much the [rap] scene anymore. I just started singing and it felt more natural to me. And I was like, I want to try this. I just deleted everything off my SoundCloud, changed my name to Role Model. There was no thought or meaning behind it. And I put up a song and immediately it did better than anything I had put out previously. I was like, ‘This feels like an indicator.’”
He still toyed plenty with different sounds to find what was right – maybe at first for the algorithm or the fans, but eventually for himself. This was a process that continued into writing Kansas Anymore, whose deluxe version just dropped in February.
He first tried a synth-heavy ’80s pop vibe, and then what he calls more “Strokesy” guitar rock, but nothing felt like it fit perfectly for him. Making his second record required a literal return to his roots, to his metaphorical Kansas so he could leave it again.
“I took a little bit of a break and was going home a lot to Maine,” he said. “Whenever I go home, I listen to a very specific type of music, country-tinted songs. And that started to influence me. I was going home a lot in the summer, and started making songs in a room where it was just…acoustic, warm sounds. Piano, guitar, nothing synthetic. And that’s how we got here.”
Fast-forward to now. On February 24, he kicked off an already nearly sold-out headlining tour across the U.S. On July 23 he’ll be joined by Gracie Abrams for most of the final dates.
“I think my biggest fear is putting out another album after [Kansas Anymore] and people being like, ‘This sounds just like the last one,’” he says. “I don’t want that ever.”
That was the impetus behind the newly-released deluxe album. He wanted more for his fans. And more for himself, too.
“I also knew, selfishly, how much touring I had ahead of me for the next year, and knew that I would get a little bored playing the same songs every night,” he says. “I know myself well enough to plan out enough to where we can add four new songs to the set list, which we just did for North America, and now it’s given me a breath of fresh air. It’s just very new and exciting for me, and the set doesn’t get old.”
Given how much he’s played with his identity and sound over the years, it’s natural to wonder where he goes from here?
He acknowledges that the gears on the next LP have been turning for a while, but he’s quiet about it. He’s quiet about a lot of things. Tour life will do that. Leaving it out on the “field” every night, long drives, early load-ins, maybe a few too many drinks the night before clashing with the bright Orlando sunshine.
He can disclose enough to reassure fans that he’s not abandoning this version of Role Model, of Tucker Pillsbury. But, like adding songs to the deluxe release to keep both fans and he and his band interested months after the release, he still wants to have the creative freedom to stretch his legs a little.
“I’m not going to ditch this, like, pokey, country-tinted Americana pop thing,” he says. “I just want to add things to it now that I think will be new and refreshing.”
When he reflects on the writing process for Kansas Anymore, all of the ideas that ended up in the bin, he weighs the possibility that maybe he was going through a little bit of a quarter-life crisis at the time. Maybe it was a bit like that process in Pittsburgh, where he summarily deleted a whole previous body of work that maybe at one point felt like the right thing to do but now felt forced, or at least not a true representation of what was inside.
In that moment in Pittsburgh, he just opened his mouth and let what was inside come out. What was really inside, not what he thought the city or the supposed fans wanted to hear. And it turned out what was inside was what resonated.
“I started actually singing about things I was feeling,” he says. “Real things in my life. And it was cool to me that people gravitate toward that more.”
It’s true. Pillsbury certainly has a gravitational pull now in his artistic life. Watch any of his tour diary videos from abroad in Australia and New Zealand and you can see how much people love him. Not just fans, but his crew, his friends.
And, most importantly, you can see how much fun he’s having. He commands from the stage. He looks loose. His dancing never looks choreographed – both onstage to his own tunes and in the green room to old pop songs. It’s the spontaneous movement of a guy following where his legs are taking him. You get the sense that he’d be doing the same thing even if the room were empty. But it is far from empty. In this moment, he is the center of the universe pulling people who hear what he sings, how he feels inside, and want to come join him in the moment, to be close to that, to feel like they’re not alone in their own feelings or pressures or wrong for feeling things.
Suddenly, you realize that Role Model is an apt name, even if he didn’t know it at the time.
Watching Pillsbury on those videos, the forced nostalgia of footage shot on an old video camera, you can see that even when he is so far from “Kansas” – from LA, from Pittsburgh, certainly from Maine, Tucker Pillsbury, Role Model, looks plenty at home where he is, in his own skin.
At one point in the video, an Australian fan holds up a sign that says “Be honest, are you actually 5’7”?”
He assures the audience that he is really 6’, and even posts footage of being measured. Because Tucker Pillsbury has made it very clear that he is who he is, and he wouldn’t lie to you.
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