Molly Tuttle: New Band, New Sound, New Album!

One of America's best bluegrass musicians has just taken a surprising turn with a brand-new, hard-playing band that extends Molly Tuttle's sonic palette well beyond bluegrass. Let's rock!

After two consecutive Best Bluegrass Album Grammys—Crooked Tree in 2023 and City of Gold in 2024—as well as an armful of lesser awards, there wasn’t much left for Molly Tuttle to prove in bluegrass, and when you’re 32, there are worlds to conquer. Although Tuttle considers bluegrass “such a big part of what I do,” she felt a growing need in the early-to-mid 2020s to stretch out beyond the genre’s boundaries and conventions. (As she had in her first two solo albums, 2019’s When You’re Ready and 2020’s ….i’d rather be with you, both of which I have referred to elsewhere as “roots-inflected pop.)

Those familiar with Tuttle’s biography can go still further back in putting her involvement with bluegrass in context. In her hometown Palo Alto, CA, Molly spent perhaps as much time listening to Rage Against the Machine and Bay Area punk bands like Operation Ivy and Rancid as she did to bluegrass, which her father taught for a living. In high school, she plugged in with pickup rock groups. As close as bluegrass is to her heart, she could never be accused of musical orthodoxy. As she said recently, “I like to keep people guessing and keep [my music] full of surprises.” Flatt & Scruggs diehards, be warned!

Earlier this year, Tuttle replaced Golden Highway with a very different band: four highly versatile musicians who share a taste for hard-driving roots music and are all, as it happens, women. On June 24th, or last Tuesday, a revved-up Tuttle & Co. played their first full-length show, at the Mercury Lounge, the storied indie-rock venue on Manhattan’s East Houston Street.

Portrait of a woman who loves her job: Mercury Lounge, New York City, June 24, 2025

Seven of the songs in the generous 18-song set were from Tuttle’s new album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine. The new band is likely to remain nameless; Tuttle’s label, management, and Molly herself all consider Miss Sunshine as much of a solo project as were When You’re Ready and ….i’d rather be with you. The players: the acoustic and electric bassist Vanessa McGowan, who has a jazz background; the hard-hitting, sure-handed (and footed) drummer Meghan Jane; Ellen Angelico, who blasted several Fender Telecaster solos and also plays dobro, banjo, and pedal-steel guitar (though she didn’t bring her pedal steel to the Mercury); Mary Mayer on fiddle, mandolin, and keyboards. And, of course, Molly Tuttle, a guitarist whose technique and imagination never cease to astonish: a flat-out virtuoso. And a singer “whose light soprano,” I wrote in a March 28th, 2022 New York Times profile of the artist, “packs a surprising wallop.”

She needed every bit of that wallop at the Mercury Lounge. Although they turned the volume down for a five-song bluegrass mini-set, an assurance to Tuttle’s bluegrass fans that she’s not about to desert them, this band, powered largely by Meghan Jane’s muscular drumming, rocks hard and loud. I spent the set standing at the side of the stage, ie. as close to the noise as possible, happy to satisfy my taste for floor-shaking volume. And the band, as I’ve already written, is far more a bunch of bashers. It’s a pleasure to speculate about its evolution, about the roads that lie open to so gifted a group, with such formidable chops, on their upcoming journey.

So Long Little Miss Sunshine won’t be released until August 15^th; for now, Tuttle’s fans will have to be satisfied with a pre-released single and video, “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark.” Miss Sunshine was produced by the Nashville insider Jay Joyce (Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, Eric Church), a much more commercially minded figure than Jerry Douglas, the bluegrass eminence who co-produced Crooked Tree and City of Gold with Tuttle. If Molly brought Joyce on board to broaden her listenership, I’ve got no beef with that. Nor, to his credit, has he by any means trivialized Tuttle’s sound—he has, in fact, enriched it.

Although Tuttle and Ketch Secor, the co-founder and frontman of the long-lived, unclassifiable band Old Crow Medicine Show, have been romantic partners for five years, Tuttle has taken her time to speak openly about a relationship which, as she told me, has had a big, positive impact on her life. As she sings on “No Regrets,” one of the new album’s several love songs, “Every goodnight when you’re here by my side/I know this is as good as it gets.” The couple is also a prolific songwriting team; they co-wrote most of the songs on So Long Little Miss Sunshine.

Another indication that Tuttle is in a good place emotionally is that, with passing time and a lot of hard work on herself, she is evidently finding it less difficult to live with alopecia areata, the incurable auto-immune disorder that left her entirely without body hair at age three, a tremendous emotional burden for a child—for anyone. After wearing hats as a child, she switched to wigs in high school. (She is, in fact, proud of what has become a substantial collection, and has fun working with wig stylists to design striking, glamorous wigs.)

At my first several Molly Tuttle shows, three years ago, the wig stayed on for the entire set. But Tuttle has grown increasingly willing to toss it off, as well as to say a few words from the stage about living with alopecia. If, as she has noted in the past, the disease has had any benefits, it has given her a strong empathy for others who, for one reason or another, feel that they don’t belong. (Yes, Crooked Tree, album and song, are references to Molly’s alopecia.)

At the Mercury Lounge, the wig came off, to cheers, well before the show was over. Tuttle performed the last four songs wigless. One was “Crooked Tree,” with its self-affirming lyric “like the crooked tree/I’m growing stronger day by day.” This is already an individual of impressive, hard-won strength.