There is a new generation of Y/N’s, but this time, they’re all named Sally, and they’re in the crowd at a Role Model show.
In the middle of February, 27-year-old musician Role Model was gearing up for the North American leg of No Place Like Tour, when he released “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out” as part of the deluxe version of his album, Kansas Anymore. Now, every night when he performs it, he gets to the bridge and he calls out, “Where’s my Sally?” and one of his fans comes on stage to dance with him to what might just become the song of the summer. So far, those fans have also included celebrities like Renée Rapp, Dylan Minnette, and Jake Shane, the inaugural Sally who inspired Role Model’s favorite new party trick.
“We had no plans to do this whole ‘Sally’ thing,” Role Model aka Tucker Pillsbury, tells Teen Vogue. “I knew right before the tour started that Jake Shane was going to be in Dallas at the same time doing the show, so we were like oh we should bring him out. And then online there was this rumor that started that ‘Sally’ was about Jake Shane. So we were like why don’t we just play into this and have a silly Internet moment and do a ‘One Less Lonely Girl’ type of thing and bring back that moment from [Justin] Bieber.”
An undeniable part of liking pop music in the modern age: the tour will be posted. Every night, all the 40-second clips from the concert can be pieced together so that you might actually be able to see the whole show from your phone. It seems that “One Less Lonely Girl” experience is now more important to the concert experience than ever. What once could have been a brand new show every time an artist stepped in front of a brand new audience is no longer that. And while the novelty of live performance will never die, artists and fans alike seem to be craving an element of surprise that distinguishes their show from the avalanche of clips. Who’s getting Sabrina Carpenter’s handcuffs tonight? Who’s Matty Healy gonna kiss this time? What are Taylor Swift’s surprise songs? Where’s Tucker’s Sally?
Emma Covas, 18, and her friend had gotten to the 9:30 Club in D.C. only an hour early with a general admission ticket she got for $37. Once they got in, they were nowhere near the barricade, instead standing near an elevated railing farther back so they could get a better view. They were so far back and up high that she had no expectation of what was about to happen.
“I don’t get to go to concerts that much because they’re so expensive nowadays,” Covas says. “I was really just enjoying myself and dancing a lot, and at one point, I see him look up at me. I don’t know, I tried to make a little bit of an impression.” During the song, “Old Recliners,” she pointed to him during the song, and then waved at him. “And I swore, he smiled and giggled. I turned to my friend and said, ‘I swear he just looked at me,’ and she said, ‘I think he did too.’”
Then, minutes before “Sally,” she was approached by Role Model’s tour manager, Devyn van Velthuyzen, who Covas thought was coming to yell at her for being too loud and disruptive in the crowd. “But she holds my hand and says, ‘Do you wanna be Sally?’ I just went speechless.”
That’s how the story has gone for most of the Sallies. August Di Liello in Montreal, Emily Rubel in Brooklyn, Ali Cannuli in Charlotte, Paige Wilkinson in Philly, and so on. Van Velthuyzen taps them all in the middle of the show, brings them side stage, talks them up, and counts them down to the cue: “Where’s my Sally?”
‘“My friends had been joking in the weeks leading up to the show, ‘You stand out in the crowd. You’re going to be Sally,’” says August Di Liello, 20, who has a head full of bright blue hair, and had only been informed of the Sally trend through his friends since he himself doesn’t have a TikTok. “So when I was asked that, I was like, ‘No you’re joking.’ It just felt like it was still a joke with my friends.”
Di Liello had only started listening to Role Model after getting invited to the show by his friends, and after talking to other fans in line who had been fans for multiple years, he almost felt like an imposter for being Montreal’s lucky choice. But he also likened it to his experience going to the Short n’ Sweet Tour and the Eras Tour, where fans in the audience were chosen each night to be involved in the show, Carpenter with her handcuffs and Swift with her “22” hat. “Watching it not being the person receiving the interaction, I’ve always found it really sweet, and it’s like still one of my favorite parts of the shows to be like, ‘This person is having a joyous moment.’”
And there is a clear kind of euphoric joy to the Sallies. Cannuli, 16, runs a small fan page @rolemodeldetails, which is followed by the official No Place Like Tour Instagram account, and she thinks that might have played a role in how she got selected. “I did post my exact spot on the barricade the day of the show,” she says. “Now everybody has been telling me, ‘Girl, you’re living out your Wattpad dream.’ I was like, ‘Honestly, yeah kinda.’ I don’t think I’ve been called my name in the past week. I’ve just been called Sally.”
So many fans now make posts joking about practicing their Sally routine if they get picked. Even actor Ariana Greenblatt posted an Instagram story confessing to “pretending to be sally” when she listens to the song. But Paige Wilkinson, 20, was so sure she wouldn’t be chosen that she told her friends that she would do the worm on stage if she did. “They were like, ‘Yeah okay, we’d love to see that happen,’ feeding the delusion,” she says. “It actually happened, so I said, I have to do it. I said I would do the worm, so I dropped down on that stage and made it happen.”
It seems there’s no better way for an artist to gain new fans than showing them a perfect glimpse into a live show, and maybe even giving them a little FOMO about not being there themselves. Covas’s $37 GA ticket was purchased back in September, and on the day of the March show, by the time Role Model’s “Sally” bit was in full swing, those same tickets were going for no less than $300 on resale websites.
The Sallies are less than two months old, and it’s still very new and fun to anticipate, but it remains to be seen how long this can go on, especially if fans start getting competitive with it. The novelty of Carpenter’s “Nonsense” outros eventually ran dry, and she chose to retire them. The sheer mania around Swift’s surprise songs for the Eras Tour had gotten out of hand to the point of being memed. Role Model’s venues, meanwhile, seem to only be getting bigger. Pillsbury got sick during tour and had to postpone the March 16 Boston show, and the rescheduled venue, MGM Music Hall, has more than double the capacity of the original venue. Some fans are worried that these special interactions with their favorite artist will go away as his career skyrockets. But Role Model himself promises otherwise.
“Yeah…not true,” Role Model laughs when I bring up those fan concerns. “I mean now, I’m going to do this for life. This is a fun thing that has suddenly become a new staple for the show and is expected. So this will always happen. We’re going to figure out a way to make this happen for festivals and in between. It’s fully built into the show now. I guess people’s chances are going to get more slim as the shows grow. This is what happens, I guess.”
The “Sally” trend had no hope of ever staying contained within the fandom. Role Model has invited special guests to be Sally, and that’s included real life popstars like Rapp in LA, but also his own mom last night in Boston. He’s also brought on comedians and content creators who run modern youth culture just as much as singers do — Grace O’Malley, Connor Wood, Hamzah and Martin of @slushynoobz, and of course, Shane. Both Shane and O’Malley were on their own tours, and their dates and cities happened to line up with No Place Like Tour.
X content
O’Malley had known that her D.C. show and Role Model’s show overlapped. She came home “a little tipsy one night” and shot her shot by posting a TikTok suggesting that maybe she should be Sally in D.C. The next day, he shot her a DM asking her to be the D.C. Sally. “I was trying my best to play it cool in the DMs of it all,” she says. “I have to say, I practiced. I practiced what I was gonna do, and that was not it, but it couldn’t have gone better.”
O’Malley is referring to the fact that as soon as she got on stage, she tripped and fell, spilling some of the drink she had planned on handing to him. The moment was an instant classic and went immediately viral. But the Sally trend became so much more than a “silly Internet moment.” The response from the crowd turned it into something else.
.jpg)
“People f*cking loved it, not only on the Internet but in the room,” Role Model says.” After Shane’s appearance, night after night, new videos captured fans coming out on stage with Tucker, and people realized it was becoming a thing.
“I remember I sent the video from the Tampa show to my friend, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, this could be us. This is insane,’” says Long Island resident Emily Rubel, 17. She and her friends had planned to take the morning train into Brooklyn for the show, and she pushed them to take the earliest train possible. “I wouldn’t say I dragged my friends, but I remember texting them like, ‘Okay we’re going to take an 8:00 train. Actually no, 7:30. Mmm..maybe 6:30.’”
But Role Model isn’t so concerned with how early you get there. He loves the enthusiasm of the overnight campers, but he and his team are trying to choose people from all over the venue. Beyond that, he wants the Sally portion of his show to be organic and exciting, and not something to get competitive about. “I don’t even want to speak on [how to get chosen,]” he says.
One thing that’s definitely changed since the start of these “Sally” performances is the nature of his DMs.
“Now it’s full-on pleas and people trying to make deals under the table to be Sally,” he says. “Which 1, It’s never going to work. You’re never going to bribe your way in. If you ask…I don’t know…I don’t want people to ask. We do it in the moment, we pick people in the moment.”
