Women's Lifestyle August 20, 2026 0 Comments

September 2026’s Music Director Revealed – You Won’t Believe Who’s Taking the Baton and Why It’s a Game-Changer!

Ever caught yourself lost in the warm, fuzzy glow of “remember when” moments, maybe even a tad too often? Tucker Pillsbury, or as he spins his tales, Role Model, wears that nostalgia like a badge—sometimes to a fault, he admits. But here’s the kicker: for his third studio album, Chuck Timely & the Hourglass, he’s not holding back from diving deep into those memories. Imagine a sonic time machine cruising through six decades of music, remixing the coolest yacht rock vibes with today’s pop sensibility—it’s like putting a cowboy on a yacht, as Tucker puts it. You can almost feel the heartbeat of Bruce Springsteen and the bittersweet echo of love lost and found, all wrapped in a playlist that feels both cozy and achingly fresh. So, why does revisiting the past through music make us yearn—and heal—all at once? Maybe Role Model’s just the guide we need to find out.

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Tucker Pillsbury, a.k.a. Role Model, is a self-described nostalgia addict, sometimes “to a fault.” But for his third studio album, Chuck Timely & the Hourglass, he’s letting himself lean into looking back.

A time-traveler’s dream, the project—which Pillsbury wants to clarify is not a concept album—takes listeners through the past six decades of music, pulling together the artist’s favorite sounds and wrapping them in a modern pop sheen. “My goal was to figure out a way to take the coolest parts of yacht rock—which there aren’t that many—and apply them to pop music, and to genre-bend a bit,” he says. “Before I even started writing the album, I made a playlist of songs that I wanted to reference, all for different reasons.” For Bazaar’s September Icons issue, he recreated that playlist almost exactly, giving us 62 minutes of cozy dad rock hits and love-sick ballads.

Between an international tour of his own and a spot opening for Gracie Abrams in the United States, the 29-year-old Maine native spent the past two years on the road, fighting homesickness and finding solace in the words of “the Bruces”—that is, Springsteen and Hornsby. “I very much relate to [Springsteen]. He seems a little bit obsessed with his hometown and where he’s from and the people that he grew up with and the people he would fall in love with as a young man,” he shares. “I definitely live in the past a little bit and look back in time a lot, and I think Springsteen is the king of that. Hornsby, too, and Jackson Browne, I think those three are some of the biggest yearners.”

Chuck Timely & the Hourglass is an ode to that era of musical yearning. Lyrically, it offers pining descriptions of loneliness and one-night stands (“Chasing Midnight”), the tired cycles of bad habits and old lovers (“Stain”), and the bittersweet hope that things will, ultimately, work out (“Harmony”). For the instrumentation, Pillsbury studied how Bruce Springsteen used the drums and The Georgia Satellites got “the most out of a few sounds,” he says. “High Hopes 3000,” the lead single, blends these references effortlessly.

“That was taking the piano playing in the Doobie Brothers’ ‘What a Fool Believes’ and then mixing it with Jackson Browne or The Georgia Satellites and blending it into a little country,” he explains. “It’s like if you put a cowboy on a yacht. That was the goal.”

If there’s one song on Pillsbury’s Bazaar playlist that serves as its central thesis, he says, it might have to be Billy Swan’s cover of “Don’t Be Cruel.” Where Elvis Presley’s original hit is a playful, quintessential 1950s dance song, the country artist’s 1974 version is melancholic, with an easy, groovy touch of soul that gives new meaning to its pleading lyrics. “For him, back then, to have heard an Elvis Presley song that’s upbeat, the most Elvis song of all, and to strip it down to something that feels like it could be released today? What he did was insane,” the artist says. “He felt like a time traveler.”

Listen to Role Model’s playlist exclusively on Apple Music.