New Album, Working with Dakota Johnson

“Maybe we bring back heartland rock,” Tucker Pillsbury, a.k.a. Role Model, muses on a new episode of the Rolling Stone Studio. Pillsbury is already well on his way: After getting Gen-Z to embrace Tom Petty vibes with his breakthrough single “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out,” he dove deeper into his roots on a strong new album, the just-released Chuck Timely and The Hourglass, nodding to the likes of Jackson Browne, Bruce Springsteen, and John Mellencamp. “Bringing these artists that I love…  and applying it to pop music is like a fun challenge,” he says.

In the episode, Pillsbury talks about not chasing pop stardom, the end of his “Sally” stage bit, how his girlfriend, Dakota Johnson, ended up on the album, his upcoming film debut opposite Natalie Portman in Lena Dunham’s Good Sex, and much more. Check out the whole video interview above or on YouTube; some highlights follow.

Pillsbury makes pop music, but he doesn’t want to be a pop star. “There’s just constantly this debate of who’s going to be the pop boy right now or whatever,” he says. “I just don’t want to be in that race, ’cause I’m not trying to be a pop star. I think you can hear it in the music and by who I choose to work with, and, I don’t know, how I carry myself. Being a pop star is not interesting to me. I don’t want to do that. But I love pop music and I love making it.” As for the shiny outfits and background dancers that come with the job: “For some reason, that has always, like, scared me. I like kind of being a little bit whatever’s just under that.”

He followed through on killing his “Sally” stage bit — and says almost nobody cared, except some very disappointed kids. When Pillsbury first told Rolling Stone he was ending the nightly guest-star routine, he predicted fans wouldn’t “even give a shit.” He was right. “I don’t think anyone cared,” he says now. “Aside from people, like, coming up to me with their daughter and being like, ‘Can she be Sally when you play, like, Red Rocks in the fall or whatever?’ And then I have to break the news. I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry.’” The decision came down to faith in the new record: “I just think if I didn’t believe in this album, Chuck, then I probably would’ve kept doing the Sally bit.” He remains his own harshest critic on his biggest song: “That was like a silly song with lyrically the dumbest bridge I’ve ever written… Lyrically, I mean, that bridge is like a children’s book.”

The album chronicles the aftermath of a rough break-up. The two-year stretch of singledom behind Chuck Timely & The Hourglass began with Pillsbury’s 2023 split from Emma Chamberlain. Does the album’s narrative track someone slipping into something like a depression? “Yeah. I think that’s true,” he says. “I mean, two years is a long time… I just didn’t know what was best for me. Like, I didn’t know, like, do I go straight into another relationship and not figure out all this whatever else is going on? Or do I really hold off and fix myself first and then go do that? And there were all these questions and no therapist at the time to help me figure that out, so it came out in songs and questions in all these songs.”

Pillsbury initially resisted putting his girlfriend, Dakota Johnson, on the album. Pillsbury and Johnson had been photographed together since January, but he only publicly confirmed the relationship this week, after fans recognized her voice in the flirtatious spoken-word bridge of the new track “Love I You.” As he explains in the episode, he knew adding her would force exactly that conversation — he’d originally recorded the bridge’s back-and-forth by himself, and wanted to keep his personal life separate from the music. “We had a list of ideas for people, and [producer] Mason [Stoops] kept bringing up, you know, ‘Why doesn’t Dakota do it?’” he says. “And I was always like, ‘Well, I don’t… I think keeping those things separate is probably good,’ and blah, blah, blah. And then one day he convinced her and I was just like, ‘Yeah, let’s try it,’ and it was amazing. Like, her voice was perfect on it. Obviously, yeah, you know that that’s gonna, like, lead to discussions online, but also, it made the song really special to me, and what a cool cameo to have, too.”

Acting alongside Natalie Portman was nerve-wracking. “I didn’t eat all day,” Pillsbury says. “Truly, I hadn’t been nervous like that in a very long time. My first day was also, like, one of the biggest scenes… and there’s, like, 100 extras watching you act for the first time.” He only got truly starstruck one time: “There was one moment where we were doing a scene and she had a monologue, and I really like got lost like staring at her and being like, whoa, Natalie Portman is delivering a monologue to me. That was the one time I got in my head, and it was amazing to watch.”

The songs he truly hates? Anything by Pitbull or Flo Rida, which depressed him growing up in icy Maine. “If someone plays, like, a Flo Rida song or, like, a Pitbull song, it makes me sad,” Pillsbury says. “I think anyone who’s from the East Coast, listening to a Pitbull song in a cold car in the dead of winter, driving to school or whatever, it’s like a microtrauma… It’s Miami pop and you’re listening to it in negative 20 degrees, driving in your little Honda Civic to high school. Like, yeah, no. So, sorry. I’m sure he’s a nice guy.”

He may change his stage name someday. “I would love to,” Pillsbury says of returning to his real name. “I really have a gut feeling that it’s too late. But I think what bothers me the most is, like, no matter what, whenever my name comes up on anything on Twitter, every comment is like, ‘What parents name their kid Role Model?’ Like, how stupid do you have to be? Like, does Post Malone go through that? Or anyone else with a name, like Lil Wayne— like, “Who names their kid Lil?” Like, you just use your brain. Think for a second, you know what I mean? Yes, I’ll probably change my name.”