Music

On singer Molly Tuttle’s newest album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, the country rising star is letting bluegrass take a bit of a backseat this time. A light, infectiously optimistic collection of songs, primarily fitting snugly within the cozy confines of country pop, Tuttle‘s latest album allows her to flex her musical muscles beyond bluegrass and the folksy Americana of her previous work.

Tuttle, who’s widely credited with bringing bluegrass closer to the mainstream following her Grammy nomination for Best New Artist in 2023 alongside musicians like Samara Joy and Anitta, grew up on bluegrass in the Palo Alto area. While the San Francisco Bay Area might not be the most obvious place of origin for bluegrass’s ingénue in residence, Tuttle’s Northern California roots creep through the Appalachian overgrowth of the genre, evident in influences like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

Tuttle grew up on bluegrass, joining her family’s band, the Tuttles, with AJ Lee when she was just 15 years old. When we asked Tuttle what it felt like to have been recognized as one of the greats in a genre she grew up on, she told us, “It’s an amazing feeling. When I see my name placed with this new generation of bluegrass musicians, it’s such a cool feeling. Ever since I was eight years old and picked up a guitar, it’s been a dream of mine to make my life centered around music. It’s just so cool that this music has had this resurgence and reached this new fan group. There are so many more people here now, and it’s great to see the music is rising.”

Although flavors of Tuttle’s bluegrass roots are evident in So Long Little Miss Sunshine, the album represents a definite departure from Tuttle’s previous work. Being that bluegrass is a very “tradition-minded” genre, we asked Tuttle how she decides when to push the boundaries of the genre a bit and when to honor its more “traditional” aspects. Tuttle tells us it’s a fine line she has to walk. Elements of her trademark guitar picking and bluegrass flair shine through on some tracks.

Still, Tuttle wanted to create something that felt wholly “her” and not necessarily centered around the structures of a more traditional bluegrass album. Tracks like “Rosalee”, a spunky bluegrass ballad, would be right at home in Tuttle’s older work, like her Grammy-winning album Crooked Tree, while others, like the lead single ‘That’s Gonna Leave a Mark”, feel like they could be plucked right from the airwaves of country pop radio.

By giving herself a bit more freedom with production design, many of the confines Tuttle was accustomed to working within seemed to slip away, allowing for more rip-roaring live performances with heavy drumlines punctuated by more traditional bluegrass-sounding tracks. Moving away from the more storytelling, folksy aspects of bluegrass, Tuttle could break away and tell her own story in a way that felt authentic to both her and the music that influenced her.

In an Instagram post promoting the record’s release, Tuttle encouraged listeners to experience the tracks in the order in which they appear on the album (a foregone art lost to streaming and shuffle play supremacy). Of how she chose to order the LP, Tuttle said it was arranged both thematically and sonically. Tracks near the end of the album, like “No Regrets”, hark on notions of acceptance and moving on, while songs like “Story of My So Called Life” show Tuttle reflecting on the blank page, deciding where her music will take her next.

The Grammy-winning singer notes, “Kicking it off with a song like ‘Everything Burns’ that’s kind of dark and restless starts off the arc of the album with a bang. There were just certain interludes we came up with to weave the songs together. Certain things happen at the end of songs that weave into the next one. It was really fun to record the album this way. We were pretty diligent about going in with the track order and recording to work out those interludes.”

Smack in the middle of the album, a cover of Swedish pop duo Icona Pop‘s 2012 hit “I Love It” makes a surprise appearance. On her decision to include the cover, Tuttle said, “It came about in a very funny and random way. I had just heard that song, and it popped back into my head. Probably because of Charli XCX blowing up. We were in the studio doing pre-production and coincidentally Jake Joyce [her producer] said, ‘I really wanna do a cover of that song, but make it really spacey and kind of trippy.’”

Molly Tuttle went home and learned the song that night, recording it the next day in an hour. By the time the album was nearing completion and Joyce sent her a tracklist, she’d almost forgotten they’d recorded it. While a Swedish pop song more than a decade old might seem incongruous to an upbeat collection of country tracks, the song seamlessly slips into the rhythm of the album, almost entirely disguised by Tuttle’s stripped-down and more melodic iteration of the track.

With much of So Long Little Miss Sunshine harkening to the act of letting go, we asked Tuttle if there were any themes in music she felt she was ready to say “so long” to. “I feel like musically I don’t know what I’d like to let go of, except for feeling like kind of a fraud in a way. Since I’m not from the South, sometimes I feel like I have a little bit of imposter syndrome. But I feel like for me I want to move forward to a more expansive vision of who I am as an artist, which I think I did a little more on this record, and I’m excited for whatever I do next because I feel like I’ve gotten a clearer vision of who I am and where I’m going.”

With bluegrass having a definitive geographic association, we asked Molly Tuttle how location influenced this album. The country singer told us that while the Bay Area still very much feels like home to her, Nashville (where she’s lived for the last decade) left its mark on this album more than it has on any of her past work.

For all its love of freedom and family, bluegrass (and country more broadly) finds itself in a precarious position as unbridled patriotism moves from “love of country” to often bordering on fascistic nationalism. With much of country music being co-opted by conservatism, we asked Tuttle if the political climate has changed her relationship to the genre.

“I do feel like, for me as a woman in this male-dominated industry. It was hard for me to find my voice within that. There was a shift I noticed in my early 20s. When I moved to Nashville, people became more curious about ‘What is it like for a woman in the music industry?’ and people weren’t really asking those questions.”