Interview: Molly Tuttle
If you’re pining to see Molly Tuttle, you better get cracking — and then you better get to Boone. At the time of this writing, there were only about 70 seats left for her Sunday, Nov. 13, show at the 629-seat Appalachian Theatre.
If you missed her Grey Eagle show back in March, you are not alone; that show, already with limited seating, sold out. The Nashville-based singer/songwriter and guitar phenom has dialed in the bluegrass sound with her 2022 release Crooked Tree, and, judging by ticket sales, the word is out about Tuttle.
At the age of 29, she’s among the top players out there, and that’s not just hearsay. In 2017, she won the International Bluegrass Music Association’s (IBMA) Guitar Player of the Year award, becoming the first woman to do so. Then, in 2018, she won it again and was also named Instrumentalist of the Year by the Americana Music Association. In 2022, she was back in the IBMA lineup, winning Female Vocalist of the Year.
But here’s the thing: Tuttle says Crooked Tree, released just this April on Nonesuch records, is her first proper bluegrass album. Her three prior releases — 2017’s Rise, 2019’s When You’re Ready, and her 2020 album of cover songs …but I’d rather be with you — were something different, and showed why Tuttle is considered a genre bender — and breaker — in the bluegrass world.
Molly Tuttle: “On Rise, I had some bluegrass musicians play on it, but my songs weren't necessarily in the bluegrass theme, and I kind of stretched outside the limits a little. I was just experimenting with different sounds, so some of the stuff on there is a little more bluegrass, especially ‘Good Enough’ and ‘Friend and a Friend.’ But then other songs, like ‘Lighting in a Jar,’ I’d call folk or Americana. It doesn't really sound like a bluegrass song to me. And then with When You're Ready, I didn't really have any real bluegrass instruments on it except for my guitar playing. I mainly have electric guitars, drums, and electric bass. I don't think of them as bluegrass songs. And my cover[s] album that I made in the pandemic was just kind of an eclectic mix of songs that I really like.”
So when her bluegrass album was still a few years away, what did the IBMA hear that won her Guitar Player of the Year? Even apart from her mainstay appearances at festivals and shows, it’s simple: Tuttle’s guitar playing is extraordinary. Her flatpicking and clawhammer styles are fully in leagues of their own, and it shows on those early albums. “Super Moon” off Rise is an engrossing and uplifting flatpicking run, and on When You’re Ready, she sings over a clawhammer gallop for “Take the Journey” that keeps folding back on itself even when you think it’s time to take a breather.
Tuttle plays guitar with a stunning level of skill that should awe not only bluegrass fans but listeners of any music. It’s not just speed — in fact, she doesn’t ever seem to play fast for fast’s sake. She plays with a kind of creativity that’s sometimes invoked when talking about surfers or chess players — people who are so comfortable with the technical aspects of their art that they can drop in experiments and improvisations you never saw coming.
She can play so far out into a guitar run you wonder how she is going to get back to the start before the measure repeats, and then she throws in another little lick where you didn’t even know there was room for one. That she does this without much ado, sometimes while singing or checking in on her band, makes the whole thing unreal. So what’s going on behind the guitar during these mind-boggling solos?
“I don't know. It's partly thinking, ‘Oh I could throw this lick in here,’ but it just goes by so fast. I've played so many hours of guitar, so my fingers are going [almost on their own]. I might be observing and thinking, ‘I didn't like when I played there,’ or, ‘I played this, so I might want to play something similar here,’ or just kind of using these little mechanisms that I have. But I do feel like I'm kind of judging my playing — ‘I liked that, what I just did,’ or maybe, ‘Oh man! I don't know if I like that. Maybe I should try to fix it somehow with what I play next.’
Yeah, it's all just kind of vague thoughts. But really, the song’s just going by so fast. At some point, you also need to learn to let it go by and not think too much because that can make you freeze up as well.
Albums aside, Crooked Tree is far from Tuttle’s first foray into the tall pastures of bluegrass music — she was raised around players and took the stage as young as 8. From there, it’s an unbroken lineage from those jamgrass days through her teens and into countless collaborations and festivals, all the way to writing her new album.
“Everything had the common thread of growing up playing bluegrass, and you could definitely hear the influence, especially in my guitar playing. But with this last record, I wanted to call up some of my dream bluegrass musicians, and I started writing these songs that I felt like were more bluegrassy than any other songs I'd written. Then the muse was kind of just flowing, and even though I thought, ‘Well I don't know what this is leading to,’ I felt like I had to follow that path.”
The songs on Crooked Tree duly embrace the bluegrass sound, and Tuttle’s band Golden Highway skillfully creates a backdrop worthy of the genre. But they also take their own liberties, adding to the style and freshening it without messing with it too much. This isn’t jamgrass or speedgrass, two offshoots that for sure roped in a lot of new fans but were sometimes left with not much place to go. The 13 songs each stand on their own, and they often dip a toe into tried- and-true Americana themes.
Opening tracks “She’ll Change” and “Flatland Girl” create female characters both alluring and fiercely independent, and “Big Backyard” embraces a wide-open spirit that Woody Guthrie would love. But it’s the title track and the next three where the album really opens up. “Crooked Tree,” a celebration of non-conformity, rolls and rollicks, displaying the virtuosity of Tuttle’s voice with a chorus inspired by a Tom Waits quote: “Oh can't you see?/A crooked tree won't fit into the mill machine/They're left to grow wild and free/Oh I'd rather be a crooked tree.”
“San Francisco Blues” blends the modern day with the gold rush days of 1849 and the Haight-Ashbury days of 1969 in a gorgeous ballad that both Gram Parsons and The Seldom Scene could have taken on. “Castilleja” grabs onto an outlaw desert tale mixing longing and death, “The River Knows” flips the murder ballad on its head, and “Over the Line” is a fast-paced rambler’s tune that brings banjo and mandolin from Golden Highway — a band she hand-picked for the album — out front.
“I've been friends with everyone in the band for a while. We have just kind of been on the scene for a while and become friends. We've all probably been friends for almost a decade, so when I was thinking about my touring band, I thought, ‘Well, these are my favorite players and they're all like good friends,’ so it was a no-brainer.”
The record’s closing song, “Grass Valley,” is Tuttle’s most clearly autobiographical number, drawing from her upbringing around California bluegrass jam sessions — but it’s not the only place she appears. In an album full of female protagonists, it would be strange if Tuttle didn’t drop herself in there somewhere, and both “She’ll Change” and “Goodbye Girl” touch on Tuttle’s longing to find new surroundings and new melodies.
“I cover ‘She's a Rainbow’ by The Rolling Stones [live and on the covers album]. I loved how that had so much cool imagery, and wanted to write a similar song that kind of took it to be a female empowerment song. Maybe people don't hear it that way when they hear The Rolling Stones’ version, but I wanted to write my own song like that. And then it ended up being ‘She’ll Change.’ It opens the album because, I think for me, this album was a bit of a departure from what I had done previously with my music, and I just kind of wanted to set a new tone for what I'm doing now.
“Goodbye Girl,” takes its name from Tuttle’s college band, which in turn borrowed the name from the fiddle tune “Goodbye Girls, I’m Going to Boston.” In Tuttle’s telling, the song’s main character is possessed by wanderlust: “She'd like to see the world/Sail around the ocean/Gonna be a goodbye girl.”
“[Those former bandmates and I] all met in Boston and we got to travel to Europe a bunch. We went all over the world. It was cool to be in a band of like-minded women who had that wanderlust, and we got to have so many cool experiences.”
“[Now] I just try to take it really easy when I get home [from touring]. But then if I'm home too long, I'm always like, ‘Where can I go?’ I love traveling. I love going on little mini vacations, even if it's just for a day or two. Even when I'm not on the road, I feel like I want to go visit somewhere else.”
Tuttle is nearing the end of the tour that’s taken her all around the country and into multiple festivals and then back to the Appalachians for a few more shows promoting Crooked Tree. After that, she’s not set on her next musical move.
“I have a bunch of ideas. I'm kind of keeping it under wraps for now because I haven't totally figured out what's next. But I definitely have a lot of new material and I think people can expect to hear some new music from me very soon.”
As we’ve heard, Tuttle has a way of surprising us, and we’ll have to wait and see what she comes up with. As her song goes: “Just when you think you know her, she'll change.”
IF YOU GO
Who: Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway
When: Sunday, Nov. 13, 7 p.m.
Where: Appalachian Theatre, 559 W. King St., Boone, apptheatre.org
Tickets: $30
(Photo by Samantha Muljat)
