MOLLY TUTTLE

One of the most compelling new voices in the roots music world, Molly Tuttle graces all of her work with a rare constellation of virtuosic playing, poignant songwriting, and an extraordinary expressive range that transcends genre boundaries. But at the heart of her singular musicality is a lifelong love of bluegrass, a genre the Northern California-bred artist first discovered thanks to her father (a music teacher and multi-instrumentalist) and grandfather (a banjo player whose Illinois farm she visited often throughout her childhood). On her new album Crooked Tree, Tuttle joyfully explores her rich and treasured history with bluegrass, bringing her unfettered imagination to finespun tales of free spirits and outlaws, weed farmers and cowgirls. The result: a body of work both endlessly forward-thinking and deeply steeped in bluegrass heritage.

“I always knew I wanted to make a bluegrass record someday,” reveals Tuttle, a Nashville-based singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist who began attending bluegrass jams at age 11. “Once I started writing, everything flowed so easily: sometimes in music there’s a pressure to come up with a sound no one’s heard before, but this time my intention was just to make an album that reflected the music that’s been passed down through generations in my family. I found a way to do that while writing songs that feel true to who I am, and it really helped me to grow as a songwriter.”

The Nonesuch Records debut from Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway—an A-list ensemble made up of Nashville musicians Dominick Leslie (on mandolin), Kyle Tuttle (banjo), Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), and Shelby Means (bass)—Crooked Tree finds Tuttle co-producing alongside bluegrass legend Jerry Douglas. In a triumph befitting of an artist who’s made history as the first women ever named Guitar Player of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association, the album features such esteemed guests as Gillian Welch, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Old Crow Medicine Show, and Sierra Hull. And while Crooked Tree marks a striking departure from the elegant eclecticism of her acclaimed 2019 full-length debut When You’re Ready and 2020’s ...but i’d rather be with you (a covers album that masterfully reinterprets everyone from FKA Twigs to Karen Dalton), each track serves as a prime showcase for Tuttle’s phenomenal guitar technique and spellbinding voice—an instrument that shifts from warmly understated to fiercely soulful with equal parts precision and abandon, occasionally treating the listener to some high-spirited yodeling.

Recorded live at Oceanway Studios, Crooked Tree simultaneously honors the bluegrass tradition and pushes the genre into entirely new directions, particularly in its lyrical content. To that end, the album’s freewheeling yet incisive title track references a bit of wisdom once shared by avant-garde troubadour Tom Waits. “There’s a quote where he talks about how a crooked tree might look strange, but in the end it’s still growing strong after all the other trees get chopped down,” says Tuttle. “I wrote that song partly thinking about all the clear-cutting of forests where I grew up, but it also encapsulates how I feel sometimes with my music. It’s about carving your own path, taking the road less traveled, and not being afraid to do the unexpected.”

Naming female bluegrass pioneers like Hazel Dickens among her most enduring touchstones, Tuttle sings the praises of wild-hearted women all throughout Crooked Tree. On the album-opening “She’ll Change,” for instance, her vocals take on a breakneck momentum as she pays adoring homage to the type of woman who fully owns her unabashed complexity. “I’d just covered ‘She’s a Rainbow’ by the Rolling Stones on my last album, and I wanted to write my own song that gives me that same feeling of celebrating femininity,” notes Tuttle, who co-wrote “She’ll Change” with Old Crow frontman Ketch Secor. Haunting and hypnotic, “The River Knows” quietly subverts the classic murder ballad, while “Side Saddle” (feat. Gillian Welch) presents a fantastically defiant anthem of resistance (“It’s about being a cowgirl, but it’s also about how I sometimes feel about being a female guitar player, where I just want to be taken seriously for what I do instead of having this extra attention on me as the only woman in the room,” Tuttle points out). And on “Castilleja,” Tuttle delivers a moody and mysterious outlaw song spotlighting her tremendous talent as a storyteller (from the chorus: “I promised you the gold in California/On a painted horse with reins of silver thread/But if I can’t steal your heart Castilleja/I’ll ghost this world long after I’m dead”). 

From song to song on Crooked Tree, Tuttle proves her undeniable gift for introducing a certain contemporary sensibility to a musical tradition many decades old. One of the album’s most trenchant and timely tracks, “San Francisco Blues” (feat. Dan Tyminski) takes the form of a sweetly sorrowful waltz, its lyrics threaded with delicate commentary on the ravages of late capitalism. “It’s about how the Bay Area used to be such a thriving artistic scene, but now it’s become almost impossible for musicians, or really most people at all, to afford to live there anymore,” says Tuttle. A more lighthearted but no less gripping portrait of the modern world, the gorgeously scorching “Dooley’s Farm” (feat. Billy Strings) reimagines the 1920s folk song “Tom Dooley”—this time casting the title character as a cannabis farmer (sample lyric: “He’ll meet you in the back of the woods at midnight/Bring a lantern cause it’s hard to find/He’s got a strain that’ll punch your lights out/Old Dooley’s gonna blow your mind”). “In the original version Tom Dooley’s a moonshiner, so Ketch and I thought it would be fun to update his story and make him a different kind of outlaw,” says Tuttle, who co-wrote about half the songs on Crooked Tree with Secor.

In many ways her most personal work to date, Crooked Tree took shape as Tuttle revisited her earliest childhood memories, at one point returning to her grandparents’ beloved farm. “My family doesn’t own the farm anymore, but my grandma and I drove out there and walked around and reminisced about the old times,” she says. “As a kid growing up in the suburbs of San Francisco, I loved being in this completely different landscape and spending so much time out on the porch, just talking and playing music and watching the lightning bugs at night.” Although Tuttle started out on violin, she took up guitar at the age of eight and found immense inspiration in the music of the seminal bluegrass artists whose records her father constantly spun at home. “I very clearly remember sitting on our couch with my guitar, flipping through songbooks and singing songs by the Stanley Brothers and Bill Monroe,” says Tuttle, who ventured into penning her own songs at age 15. After high school, she headed to Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying in the American Roots Music Program with a focus on guitar performance and songwriting. Upon moving to Nashville in 2015, Tuttle began working with a diverse mix of musicians in the Americana, folk, and bluegrass communities, continuing to refine the formidable skills that have earned lavish acclaim from the likes of The Bluegrass Situation (who noted that “her playing is rhythmically complex, technically precise, and remarkably fleet, as though there are two sets of hands running up and down the frets”).

 For the final track to Crooked Tree, Tuttle chose an autobiographical piece called “Grass Valley,” a lilting and luminous number that looks back on the infinitely formative bluegrass festivals she attended with her father as a child. “It definitely has the most personal details of any song on the album, and for that reason I didn’t know if it fit,” she says. “But then Jerry Douglas really encouraged me to include it, and during the recording process I got the idea to have my dad sing on it too—and now it’s one of my favorites.” Not only a colorful glimpse into her musical upbringing, “Grass Valley” echoes one of Tuttle’s most closely held missions behind the making of Crooked Tree. “My hope is for people to someday play these songs around the campfire at bluegrass festivals,” she says. “I’d love for people to learn the songs and play them with their friends and make them all their own. That feeling of sharing music is what I’ve always loved most about bluegrass, and that’s the feeling that I wanted to create with this album.”