The 26-year-old Tennessean’s acoustic ballad “Falling in Love at a Coffee Shop” has reached near-ubiquity with its inclusion in TV spots for DeBeers and AT&T. The lyrics — “I think that possibly, maybe I’m falling for you/ Yes there’s a chance that I’ve fallen quite hard over you” — contain a distinct honesty, sweet enough to sell just about anything. Sweet enough even, to sell Drew Barrymore on the idea of casting a musician as the love interest in her directorial debut. With a new album and his first professional acting gig — in Barrymore’s Whip It! — Pigg shows no signs of slowing down. 

“I think that’s the way things happen for underdogs sometimes,” Pigg says. He’s aware of his fortune, but the young musician doesn’t seem quite comfortable taking full credit for his successes yet. Shyness seems to work for Pigg — he got the Whip It! gig without even seeking it out. The singer was in a Nashville studio recording his next album, The Boy Who Never, out this September on RCA, when one of his managers asked him if he had any interest in auditioning for a role opposite Ellen Page. “We filmed my audition tape in the basement of the studio with a really terrible camera,” he recalls. “I’m trying to read these lines from this sentimental love scene and my manager is cracking up on the other end of the camera. That’s the version we ended up sending in. I guess [the producers] thought it was funny.” 

The film, which opens October 9, follows the story of misfit Bliss (Ellen Page) who is pressured by her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) into entering beauty pageants. She defects to Austin where she joins a roller derby team and meets Pigg’s character Oliver, the guy in the indie rock band that wins her affection. It wasn’t just dumb luck and a humorous audition tape that scored this first-time actor a role in such an impressive cast (the film also stars Kristen Wiig, Juliette Lewis, and Alia Shawkat), it was Barrymore’s insistence on the real thing. 

“[Barrymore] said one of her pet peeves is when actors who aren’t musicians try to play musicians,” Pigg explains. In addition to the opportunity to show off his musical chops, the role of Oliver also came, as love interest roles often do, with some perks. “What’s great about doing a movie opposite somebody is, regardless of how you get along, they still have to kiss you because it’s written in,” he jokes. “It’s my perfect date scenario.” 

Chances are, the strapping young songwriter doesn’t have a lot of trouble getting the kiss in real life, and if his looks don’t do the trick, his music probably will. His new album has potential to stand out in the overcrowded boy-with-his-guitar genre. Highlights are “A Ghost,” with its brass and piano accents, and “Rooftops” which, with the strange, almost haunting, vocal melody, fulfills the “Gershwin meets Motown” descriptive Pigg uses to explain the album’s sound. 

“I wanted to make sure to balance out singer-songwriter sentimentality with the rhythm and essence of funk, because who wants to listen to brooding all the time?” Certainly, Pigg himself is running out of things to brood about. After witnessing a seemingly universal soft spot for Pigg the melancholy balladeer, we can’t wait to see how the world reacts when the boy who Barrymore hand-plucked for his authenticity brings the funk.