Har Mar Superstar didn’t care much for some of my questions. After asking a fun ice-breaker about a Tweet he made earlier in the day about Avril Lavigne exposing her butt cheek to him, he replies: “Man, see that’s the kind of shit that’s fun when you don’t have to go into it and explain and suck all the fun out of it. Fuck. Shit, man. It’s a little disconcerting just ’cause that’s like literally one of the last tweets I sent so I feel like the research is about that level. Is that what just happened?”

Ouch.

In the 35-year-old soul singer’s defence, my research is shoddy and I just wanted to clown around with a man who once participated in a disco dance-off in Starsky & Hutch with a coked-up Ben Stiller, covered Stevie Wonder in ginch on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and dry-sodomized a mechanical bull in a vodka ad. However, things got slightly less excruciating when I realized I was chatting with Sean Tillmann and not his lothario stage persona as he cruised down the highway to a show in Omaha, Nebraska. (He also refused to answer my question about what kind of vehicle he was touring in as it was deemed irrelevant and a weird thing to ask.)

Regardless of what kind of jalopy he was in, Tillmann is riding high. Back in April he released his fifth album, Bye Bye 17, on Cult Records, a label run by his long-time friend Julian Casablancas of the Strokes. On the record he’s moved away from grind-up-on-you R & B to tearful-lovemaking Motown soul and it’s regarded as one of his finest yet. Best of all, it’s not a novelty album like his previous offerings.

“There was humour on the other ones—more double and triple entendres,” he says. “But I was trying to make records that if I looked like R. Kelly you wouldn’t question them at all. I think it’s funny ’cause I look funny.”

Another person who’d agree his latest isn’t a farce is the mayor of his old haunt, who recently issued a proclamation making September 20 Har Mar Superstar Day in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“The mayor Tweeted at me because he liked one of my songs [‘Restless Leg’]. I jokingly said gimme a day. Then he gave me a day.”

Curiously, Mayor R.T. Rybak has also bestowed this honour on hip-hop collective Doomtree and Replacements guitarist Slim Dunlap in the past year. Heck, I think they might have a hipper mayor than us.

Even if sitting at home and listening to the musical offerings of this unlikely soul man is about as appealing to you as watching Soul Man, Tillmann vows that his live show is worth ditching the family on Thanksgiving Sunday for. Though he no longer takes his pants off as in past years, he’ll sing shirtless while doing headstands at what he calls a “fun and sweaty” affair. Perhaps slipping into character a little, he also promises “You’ll probably get laid if you show up, so you should probably do that.”

I’ll second that mostly because I want to see what his tour van looks like. And also, before we ended our awkward phone conversation, Tillmann playfully signed off by confirming that “Avril’s butt cheek was fantastic.”