Tucker Pillsbury said he started seeing a therapist for the first time the week before a mid-July interview, a new step he linked to the process of making his third studio album, Chuck Timely & the Hourglass. The 29-year-old artist said the work was already pushing him to look harder at himself, and that the timing made sense because he had years of issues he needed to begin dealing with.
Chuck Timely & the Hourglass is due out Aug. 7, which is why interest around Pillsbury is peaking now. He said the album and the songs he wrote for it led him to therapy, and that the record made him question how much he really had figured out about himself. He also said once-a-week therapy was not enough, adding that the first sessions were going well.
Pillsbury, who is more commonly known as Role Model, said he had "30 years of sh*t" to work through and that making the album forced a level of self-examination he could not avoid. He described the project as something that changed how he saw his own life, not just a set of songs to promote. That is the thread running through his comments: the album did not simply mark a release date, it appears to have opened a personal reckoning that had been waiting for him.
There was also a note of resistance to the usual pressure that comes with a viral hit. Pillsbury said he did not feel pressure to follow up the success of Sally, even while calling it his most famous bridge and saying he would keep performing it until he was in a wheelchair. He said he loved the song, but also joked that its lyrics, especially the bridge, could have been written by a 5-year-old. For now, the larger story is not whether he can top Sally. It is that he says the new album has already sent him into therapy, and that he is only beginning to sort through what comes next.
