Molly Tuttle

With her diverse new album full of amazing playing, there are changes afoot for the Grammy Award-winning acoustic-guitar virtuoso as she takes a few steps away from her bluegrass roots

- David Mead

We first interviewed Molly Tuttle in issue 449 back in 2019 when she was playing a tiny venue in Bristol.

In those days, she was beginning to gain recognition through YouTube videos that displayed her stunning acoustic-guitar technique, but she still wasn't very well known on this side of the Atlantic. Since then she's become a regular at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry as well as the annual Grammy Awards, having won Best Bluegrass Album for two consecutive records, Crooked Tree and City Of Gold.

When we met up with her in London in May, she was about to play at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Highways Festival and was eager to talk about her new record, So Long Little Miss Sunshine. It's an album that signals a stylistic gear shift, funnelling pop, rock and country genres into her own unique Americana-rich style. It's a somewhat interesting tactic for an artist who has so far forged an amazing career on the bluegrass circuit, but as she tells us, these days her maxim is "keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises!"

With an album title like So Long Little Miss Sunshine, are we about to see a new side of Molly Tuttle?

"It's a line from one of my songs called Old Me (New Wig), and that song also has the line in it, 'Breaking up with the old me...' So I think it's, in a way, a little bit of a wink to the fact that the new album is really different musically from my last two records, which were pretty straight-ahead bluegrass. My first album [When You're Ready, 2019] was a little more in the Americana or pop vein, and then I did a covers album [...But I'd Rather Be With You, 2020] that was all over the map, genre-wise.