Tucker Wetmore Could Get Used To This

Tucker Wetmore is still getting used to this. When we meet in the green room after his photo shoot for this story, he’s sat on a couch, button-down shirt slightly open, a Zyn nicotine pouch within reach. We talk casually for all of two minutes before Wetmore’s instincts take over and he starts addressing me as “ma’am.” “I just started all this last February,” he says. “Ever since then, it's been an absolute whirlwind.”

“Whirlwind” is a fitting word to describe Wetmore’s life these days. The 25-year-old country artist’s career has been moving at a dead-sprint pace ever since his debut single, “Wine Into Whiskey,” altered the TikTok algorithm forever in February 2024, earning him his first entries on both the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs charts. His follow-up single, “Wind Up Missin’ You,” also found success on TikTok and peaked at No. 31 on the Hot 100 shortly after. Cut to a year later, and Wetmore has released his debut album What Not To, played NYLON’s inaugural Stagecoach party, accumulated over a billion streams, and snagged a supporting slot on Thomas Rhett’s Better In Boots tour, where he serenades roughly 10,000 people per night.

But even with his growing list of accolades, Wetmore is hesitant to equate his success with stardom. “I wouldn't call it fame,” he says. “It's more like — it's different. [I’ve] just been all over the place, all over the world, playing music and having people sing my songs back to me. I wake up every day and think to myself, ‘I'm blessed.’”

If his modesty seems performative, spend some time with him and you’ll see that’s just who he is. Wetmore grew up in Kalama, Washington, a town of “2,500 people if everybody’s home,” where he devoted his formative years to football but felt called to take up the piano after taking a blues class. He got his hands on a “janky” keyboard and would practice in his bedroom for hours on end. “Nobody knew I played besides a handful of people, maybe,” he recalls — until his mom caught him playing “Hey Jude.” “She comes back to my room and she goes, ‘Tucker, what are you doing?’ I [was] like, ‘Playing the piano.’ She goes, ‘Since when?’"

Wetmore went on to play football for Montana Tech, but after a leg injury cut his career short, he returned to music on his mom’s advice and spent the next three years in Nashville writing songs every single day. When he wasn’t “word-vomiting on paper,” he was delivering DoorDash orders with his less-than-reliable car. The grind paid off — Wetmore signed his first publishing deal in 2022 after a series of right place, right time meetings.

The week of his 24th birthday, Wetmore penned what would later become “Wine Into Whiskey” and “Wind Up Missin’ You.” He teased the tracks on TikTok soon after, and despite his modest following (Wetmore estimates he had around 40,000 followers at the time), the songs went viral almost instantly. “That was probably the moment I was like, ‘I might have a chance,’” he says.

Once Wetmore arrived on the country-music scene, there was no going back. He got right to work on What Not To, an arresting debut that chronicles an introspective young guy’s coming of age across 19 songs, 11 of which were co-written by Wetmore. The album opener, “Whatcha Think Is Gonna Happen?” paints a less-than-flattering picture of Wetmore’s track record with women and whiskey wherein the singer admits he “can't turn down temptation.” On the vulnerable title track, he wonders if he can raise a family without following his estranged father’s footsteps, who left when Wetmore was 10 years old. “I gotta admit, I don’t know what to do / But thanks to you, I know what not to,” he sings.

In a further rejection of country music’s macho, dirt-in-the-wound reputation, Wetmore says he knows “a lot more than the average man would, which is kind of a leg up,” about what women want to hear. (He’s the only boy in a family of five children.) He’s also an admirer of Chappell Roan — “The Giver” is “pretty good” — and Sabrina Carpenter, with whom a collab “would be sick,” he says. “That's No. 1 on the bucket list.” As for the other major players in the great pop-country revival, he speaks highly of Post Malone’s F1-Trillion (“I listen to it almost every day”), and respects what Beyoncé did on Cowboy Carter, even if the record doesn’t exactly align with his taste.

A mere two months after the release of What Not To, Wetmore is fine-tuning his own preferences while working on his next project. If album one was all about saying everything he wanted to say, album two is a chance for experimentation. “I want to do things different, and I don't want to be put in a box,” he says. He recently hosted a writing retreat at a rented lake house, during which he and his friends came up with a song with an unexpected Dr. Dre-esque instrumental. He’s also feeling inspired by Queen and The Eagles, and says he hopes to combine his “new-age songwriting” ideas with the soundscape of the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Even if his reality is now all vintage mics and amphitheaters, Wetmore the country star has only been in the making for a few years. But perhaps his mom knew what he was capable of long before she caught him singing in his room that fateful afternoon. “She always tells me stories of when I was 2 years old sitting in the truck. I couldn't even speak full sentences, but I would sit there and tap my foot and harmonize with my uncle, singing whatever was on the radio,” he says. “I've always had it in my blood, I guess.” Back in the green room, as he breaks down the song-structure conventions of yesteryear with a smile that comes through in his voice — “half a chorus, then back into the verse, and then a music break out of nowhere” — you can see how that very well could be true.