Role Model’s second album ‘Kansas Anymore’ finds a path through homesickness, heartbreak, and finding yourself. Check out our latest Dork Mixtape cover feature.
Words: Neive McCarthy.
Photos: William DeSena.
There’s no place like home. Close your eyes, click your heels three times and repeat that sentence. You might just be transported into the world of Role Model’s second album, ‘Kansas Anymore’. Otherwise known as Tucker Pillsbury, Role Model found the idea that absence makes the heart grow fonder began to ring truer and truer. Living in LA, processing a relationship breakdown, and discovering a new maturity and outlook, the 27-year-old found his heart clamouring to return to his home of Maine.
“It’s a lot of things,” Tucker explains. “I was spoiled to have been born and raised there. It’s truly a beautiful place with some of the most beautiful people. I don’t know how to describe it. You have mountains, you have the ocean, it’s beautiful. You have everything. Yes, it’s a little bit colder, but I grew up always being outside. There was no desire to be inside, watching TV or playing video games. I never did that because I got the privilege of growing up in such a beautiful place, and I think I missed that.”
LA’s thick heat and busy lifestyle couldn’t have been more different from what Tucker had left behind. Though each has its virtues, when feeling homesick, those disparities became more and more stark.
“In LA, I lived pretty much the opposite lifestyle,” he reflects. “Whether it’s the studio or not, I’m just always inside. It couldn’t be more opposite than where I grew up. It’s not to say that LA or California is a horrible place; it’s just not what I’m used to or what I love. I chose the one city that is truly the most opposite of where I came from.”
It’s only when faced with somewhere entirely unrecognisable that the most beloved parts of home come to light – knowing each bend in the road, the exact way certain corners look in the sun, the specific sound of the birds in the morning. They become more and more noticeable the more time is spent away.
“This is the first album where I really opened up about home and embraced where I’m from,” notes Tucker. “When you’re younger, whether you make music or not, you want to run away from home, and there’s no part of you that is really that proud of where you’re from. I think that comes later in life. I saw a few peers going through the same thing. Dominic Fike put out ‘Sunburn’ – that whole album is a love letter to Florida, and you could tell that he was hitting that point in his life as well, where he was starting to be nostalgic and look back on his life and missing home and family and friends. Ryan Beatty, with ‘Calico’, had the same thing – he started embracing where he was from and his influences. It just comes with age. You start to embrace where you’re from. It takes time. It’s very cliché, but you have to leave to appreciate it and fall back in love with it.”
‘Kansas Anymore’ is a complete ode to Maine and the East Coast. As the effects of being somewhere so vastly different from home began to take their toll, the album proved a means of reconnecting with that space and returning to a more authentic version of himself. ‘The Dinner’ epitomises this – tongue-in-cheek remarks clock the contrasts between home and LA, with sighs of exasperation and pride for his roots.
“This is the first album where I really opened up about home and embraced where I’m from”
“That was my last straw,” Tucker says. “I was really starting to lose my mind a little bit and question my life. I was ready to pack up and move out of it because of real dinners where those lyrics were real, and those were the conversations being had. I missed normalcy and my friends. The conversations we have are nothing like the conversations that I sit through in LA sometimes. That was about my last straw – get me out of here and take me home. That was the most I’ve championed where I’m from.”
In an environment that didn’t feel entirely comfortable or familiar, Tucker turned to music. Reaching for artists that reminded him of home, he found himself listening to things that offered a kind of solace and had a particular warmth in common that proved particularly reassuring during this time.
“Artists, albums and songs that felt like the East Coast. Noah Kahan was a huge inspiration, and he is an East Coast, New England boy. That was the idea. I wanted an album that gave me the same feelings as the albums that I love. Noah Kahan is an example, I love The War on Drugs, Zach Bryan is great, Twin Peaks are my favourite band. All those things combined. I wanted to make something that I could listen to and it give me the same feeling. Honestly, it has been. It’s pretty much all I’ve been listening to for the last four months.”
An integral part of that was capturing this warmth that shone through those influences. Golden hour light, the cool relief of a breeze breaking through heat, mellow guitar tones that feel like everything might just be okay. ‘Kansas Anymore’ basks in that glow. Opening track ‘Writing’s On The Wall’ is pure sun-soaked guitars, while ‘Scumbag’ lends itself to cathartic singalongs.
“At the very beginning of starting the second album, all I wanted to do was have an album that was cohesive and warm – that was the one word I used a lot,” recalls Tucker. “I’m very much an album person. All my favourite albums have that same feeling of warmth. I think some of that comes from live performances and live instruments, and organic sounds. I really wanted everything to be organic, warm and summery, and slightly timeless. I think, if nothing else, I got there. I did that, and it feels very cohesive. That’s the most consistent feedback about it, which makes me happy. If nothing else, that’s all I wanted to do.”
It’s a distinct left-turn from his debut, ‘Rx’, which was firmly in the alt-pop camp – there’s an authenticity here that perhaps wasn’t present before. Leaning on acoustics and softness instead, ‘Kansas Anymore’ is infused with a musicality that feels more natural for Role Model. It’s without pretence, instead favouring interesting textures and wistful musings to craft something that is far more complex. In creating something that sonically felt truer to himself, Tucker was also able to find a way to utilise his voice in a way that felt right to him, too.
“I truly don’t love my voice,” he admits. “This is the first album where I feel like I’ve figured out what not to try and do and what I can do with my voice, without trying to do anything crazy. That was another huge goal for me with this – making an album where I could listen to it and not cringe at my voice. I think I did that and found a middle ground. ‘Frances’ was a good example, where I was like, ‘Relax, don’t try and be Ariana Grande because you’re not and never will be’. I found a sweet spot. It works better with this organic sound. When we first started, I was fully trying to do this 80s synth-pop album, and it immediately did not fit my voice. We tried to go full rock, full Strokes-y stuff, and it also wasn’t me. Finally, we found a sound that felt authentic to me and my voice.”
‘Kansas Anymore’ is the sound of Role Model finding his feet, discovering what feels right and revelling in it. In discovering what works best for him, he has unlocked a whole new side of his artistry. It allowed him to get more personal lyrically, too, elevating the intimacy of his second album even more.
“I was the most self-critical of lyrics for this album,” explains Tucker. “I was scrapping anything that was just slightly boring to me. I think it’s the most I’ve talked about myself, which I didn’t realise until after the album was mixed and mastered. I listened back to my first album, ‘Rx’, and that whole album is about someone else. This time, I was talking about myself a lot more which I think could be portrayed as being more honest. It’s definitely the most open I have been about my personal life and where I came from.”
‘Kansas Anymore’ navigates a breakdown in real-time as it unravels, as well as the accompanying highs and lows of this time in Role Model’s life. With so much change in the air, there was a lot of learning to be done, and with the album as a means of processing everything that was going on in his life, Tucker found himself operating with a new level of clarity as a result of this.
“I was scrapping anything that was just slightly boring to me”
“It was a year in the beginning of just throwing paint at the wall. I had probably 50 songs that we just ended up scrapping at some point, and a huge part of that is because I started to mature out of it. I think it’s very possible that someone can mature a couple of years in a couple of months. Yes, I came out of a relationship, and that was tough, and the homesickness aspect of it, but a big part of it was maturing. Sometimes, it can just happen out of nowhere. Once that happened, we had to restart and write new songs.”
Seeing things from a completely new perspective meant a new mode of communication was necessary, too. Having recently learnt to play guitar, Tucker’s entire process seemed to shift with this album. Maturing in his personal life and growing as a musician, new possibilities opened up for him when it came to ‘Kansas Anymore’.
“When I first started making music in 2017, when I was doing my EP ‘Arizona in the Summer’, I made that all by myself in a closet,” remembers Tucker. “You sign a record deal, and you are introduced to studios, and you have someone else pressing the buttons, working the programme, recording your vocals and mixing – it comes out of your hands a bit. For this album, it felt like because I learnt to play guitar enough to write to it, I could go back to the early days a little bit and be able to start a song and write on my own in the comfort of my living room, without a producer turning around every 20 minutes being like ‘where are we? Let’s hear what you have.’. That’s sometimes distracting. It was a huge help in being able to not filter myself and being able to focus in general.”
Without that new outlook and approach, it’s hard to say whether ‘Kansas Anymore’ would’ve landed on the sound it does. In a lot of ways, it feels like the music Role Model was meant to make: entirely on his own terms and a vehicle for change and growth, the album is him at his most unfiltered, raw and passionate. From the light smiles and breezy vocals of ‘Look At That Woman’, to the gorgeous sax of ‘Slut Era Interlude’, it vocalises even his most daunting thoughts but does so in a way that it feels immersive and consoling because of its cohesively soothing sonic palette.
“I’m very excited about it,” Tucker concludes. “I hadn’t played a show in over a year. I was just in Australia doing this private showcase, and it was the first time I’d performed some of the new stuff. I was incredibly rusty, it was by no means a good show, but it got me excited. I had the live show in mind a lot while making this – I wanted it to translate well, and I think it does. I think I’m going to be able to play guitar on stage quite a bit for this, and we’re going to have to grow the band a bit because I want it to feel and sound exactly like the record. We’ll get there.”
‘Kansas Anymore’ marks a new chapter for Role Model, one where he can offer the comfort and solace he found along this journey with his listeners. Bolder but resoundingly true to himself, he has hit his stride here – things might have changed in all aspects of his life, but on his second album, he finds his way home. ■
Role Model’s album ‘Kansas Anymore’ is out now. Follow Dork Mixtape on Spotify here.
Leave a Reply