Crooked Tree, the Nonesuch Records debut album from singer, songwriter, and musician Molly Tuttle and her band Golden Highway, was recorded live at Nashville’s Oceanway Studios. The album was produced by Tuttle and Jerry Douglas and features collaborations with Sierra Hull, Old Crow Medicine Show, Margo Price, Billy Strings, Dan Tyminski, and Gillian Welch. These thirteen tracks, all written or co-written by Tuttle, explore her lifelong love of bluegrass—a genre she first discovered though her father, a music teacher and multi-instrumentalist, and her grandfather, a banjo player. Crooked Tree honors the bluegrass tradition while pushing the genre in new directions.
Molly Tuttle released “She’ll Change” November 17, 2021, on Nonesuch Records. The new track, from her forthcoming Nonesuch debut, is co-written by Tuttle and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor and is performed by an all-star ensemble of Nashville musicians, including Ron Block, Michael “Mike” Bub, Jason Carter, Dominick Leslie, Tina Adair; the recording also features Jerry Douglas, who co-produced the song with Tuttle. “She’ll Change” is available to stream and download here.
“I’ve always loved the rare bluegrass songs that are sung by women about women,” says Tuttle of the new track. “Songs like ‘It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song’ by Hazel Dickens, and ‘Ellie’ by Kathy Kallick. I wanted to write my own bluegrass song about a badass woman who lives by her own rules. ‘She’ll Change’ is my homage to the strong musical women who helped me find my own voice.”
Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway—her band of bluegrass virtuosos featuring mandolinist Dominick Leslie, banjoist Kyle Tuttle, fiddle player Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, and bassist Shelby Means—will tour the United States in 2022 in support of Tuttle’s forthcoming Nonesuch Records debut (details to be announced soon).
An award-winning guitarist and songwriter, Molly Tuttle was raised in a musical family in Northern California. Since moving to Nashville in 2015, she has worked with many of her peers and heroes in the Americana, folk, and bluegrass communities, winning Instrumentalist of the Year at the 2018 Americana Music Awards. Tuttle’s 2019 debut album, When You're Ready, received critical acclaim, with NPR Music praising its “handsomely crafted melodies that gently insinuate themselves into the memory,” and the Wall Street Journal lauding Tuttle’s “genre-boundary-crossing comfort and emotional preparedness,” calling the record an “invigorating, mature and attention-grabbing first album.”
Tuttle’s accolades also include Folk Alliance International’s honor for Song of the Year for “You Didn’t Call My Name,” from her 2017 Rise EP, and consecutive trophies for the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year; she was the first woman in the history of the IBMA to win that honor.
During the pandemic, Tuttle recorded a covers album, …but i'd rather be with you, which was released in August 2020. The record, which features guest vocals from Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, includes songs by musicians ranging from FKA Twigs to Cat Stevens, Rancid to Karen Dalton, and The National to The Rolling Stones. The New Yorker’s Jay Ruttenberg, in praising her rendition of the Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” says: “In Tuttle’s reading, the song uses a bluegrass spirit to look to the past—and a feminist allegiance to peek at the future.”
