We first interviewed Molly Tuttle back in 2019 when she was playing a tiny venue in Bristol, UK. In those days, she was beginning to gain recognition through YouTube videos that displayed her stunning acoustic-guitar technique, but she was still building her name.
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 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.
“I really like to be a chameleon and change my sound. The last few years have been so fun playing bluegrass, and that’s the music I grew up with. It’s a huge part of who I am, but it’s not the only thing I do or the only way to express myself.
“So I feel like this new album incorporates bluegrass elements, and there’s even one or two songs that could have been on a bluegrass record. I’m playing banjo, and there’s still fiddle and mandolin and all that stuff. But it’s also pushing into new territories with the songwriting and the production.”
You’ve said that some of these songs were written five years ago.
“This record was a long time in the making. During the pandemic I was writing non-stop, and I felt like I had two paths I could go down: I had this bluegrass album I’d written that became Crooked Tree, and then I had this other record that was more unknown – I didn’t know what it was going to turn into.
“I started talking to a producer, Jay Joyce, in Nashville, about making a record, and this was five years ago. I sent him some songs, but ultimately I felt like I didn’t have the material that stood alone as a record.
“I had this other batch of songs that ended up on Crooked Tree that I felt really strongly about, and I knew I wanted to record them. That’s just the door that opened up to me creatively at the time.”
“And then fast-forward five years, I’d still been writing constantly and I finally felt like I had this other batch of songs that I wanted to record with Jay, and his production ideas were amazing. He was so fun to work with.
“But we’ve literally been talking about doing this for five years, and so I’d say maybe, like, four or five of the songs are from that original batch that I had been working on during the pandemic. I’ve been writing songs all along the way since then, and probably the bulk of them I’ve written in the past year or two, but there are still those ones that I really loved from back then that I ended up recording.”
What’s the songwriting experience like for you? Can you sit down to write on automatic or do ideas just come to you out of the blue?
“I fall somewhere in between. There are certain songs that I write from a little idea that maybe I wrote down in my phone or in a notebook somewhere, and I’ll just collect these little song nuggets as I go throughout my life.
Once I start a song, I don’t like to halfway finish it and then come back to it later
“I don’t always have time to sit down and write an entire song, so that’s really helpful to just have a running list of ideas. Some of them are total garbage and I look back and go, ‘What was I thinking?’ But if I don’t write them down, I’m never gonna remember the good ones.
“Other times I just sit down and write something from scratch, and that always takes a long time. I’ll work on it over multiple days, but it’s always really satisfying when it’s finally finished.
“Once I start a song, I don’t like to halfway finish it and then come back to it later. There are songs on the new record that were just kind of sitting there, and I came back and rewrote entire sections of them. So sometimes songs will go through, like, five different iterations.”
You have a beautiful new custom Martin acoustic with you. What’s the story there?
“Well, I actually met a woman in Nashville who works with Martin and she reached out and said, ‘Do you ever play Martin guitars?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I started out when I was 12.’ I’d saved up $2,000 just from busking and playing gigs and asking my grandparents for money at Christmas and stuff. I went into the music store where my dad used to teach and they had this Martin HD-28V that [had] an Adirondack spruce top.
“I was coveting this guitar; I always really wanted a Martin. I started out on a Baby Taylor, and then I graduated up to Blueridge guitars. But I coveted Martins because that’s what all my favourite guitar players had. So that was my first nice guitar that I ever bought as a kid.
“Then I bought a vintage Martin when I went to college – a ’48 D-18. That was another Martin I loved, but I sold both of them. I sold my first ever Martin to my aunt and now it’s in the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.”
Did you tour with Martins earlier on in your career?
“The old vintage Martin I had, I toured with it for a while and it was really hard to tour with. I felt like I was damaging it because of all the travel and the wear and tear. You go to different climates and those old guitars don’t have an easy way to adjust the action because they don’t have truss rods. So eventually it just wasn’t practical, and I kind of needed the money, so I sold it and ever since then I’ve been playing different guitars.
“So I told all that to [the woman I met in Nashville] and she set me up with the Martin folks. I talked to them about building this guitar, which is a custom: it’s Madagascar rosewood on the back and sides.
“They sent me a bunch of pictures of different wood and I liked this cool stripe that this one had down the middle. And it has my logo.
“When I made Crooked Tree, the guy who designed it made this cool ‘MT’ logo out of branches, so I sent that to [Martin], because we were going back and forth about inlays, and then they had the idea to make these branches that get more and more crooked. That goes with my song, Crooked Tree, and I went with this sunburst, which is kind of unusual to see on a Martin. It’s sort of like a J-45 sunburst.”
Did you ask Martin for any particular specifications?
“For the neck size, I went with sort of a V-shaped neck and a 1 11/16-inch size [nut width], which is what I usually use. I got it last summer. I was playing in Pennsylvania, near where the Martin factory is, and I remember I went there as a teenager with my dad.
“I think we were visiting relatives in the Midwest, and we took a little side trip to go see the Martin factory and it was so cool. So they came down to the show that we played in Pennsylvania last summer and brought me my guitar and I got to play it there at the show for the first time, which was really exciting.”
Have you had an acoustic guitar pickup installed in it?
“Right now, this one has an LR Baggs HiFi pickup. I think it’s just the HiFi – they have a HiFi and a HiFi Duet. I’ve been playing this on stage for when I go to clawhammer guitar, which is kind of a percussive style of guitar playing. And this pickup and guitar combo sounds pretty good for that.”
Do you use a mic for the guitar as well as on stage?
“Yeah. In my other guitar that I play on the flatpicking stuff, I actually just got a microphone put inside the guitar and it was kind of a complicated process. So now I have a pickup in that guitar, under the saddle, and a mic in the soundhole.
“I have the pickup jack [in the end-pin] and then there’s actually another hole drilled inside where the mic comes out, so I can run two lines from that guitar. The pickup is really helpful because it doesn’t feed back; you can get it really loud.”
“So no matter where we’re playing, if we’re playing in a small club where the audience is really noisy, or if we’re in a big arena, I can still get the guitar at the right volume and I don’t have to worry about feedback or it sounding washy.
“But then the mic helps make it sound like a natural-sounding guitar. I’m still kind of figuring out if I want to put it in this [guitar], or start putting one in all my guitars. It’s a little bit of a commitment because you’re literally drilling a new hole into the wood of your guitar.”
Do you have preferences for woods, for the backs and sides of your guitars?
“It really just depends on the guitar itself. This is the only one I have with Madagascar rosewood. I think it sounds really cool, but I didn’t really know what to expect because all my other guitars are either mahogany or Indian rosewood. Rosewood is more piano-like to me because you have all these other reverberant notes around it.
“I actually just bought a 1943 D-18 that’s mahogany and I love it. It’s like it’s a mahogany guitar, but it sort of has some of that resonance of a rosewood guitar, and I’m debating if I want to take it out on tour. I bought it to be my studio guitar for when I record albums or go play on other people’s records.”
Along with the new record, you have a new band, too.
“Yeah, it’s gonna be super-fun. One of the musicians is Mair [Mary Meyer]; she’s gonna be playing fiddle and she might play some banjo. We had our first rehearsals about a week ago, and she was playing fiddle, mandolin and keys. It’s fun because she’ll be switching instruments mid-song.
We had no intention of making an all-female band. It was literally just the best people for each possible position in the band
“Ellen Angelico is playing with me, and she plays electric guitar, but she also plays dobro and banjo and pedal steel. So there’s a ton of options there. Megan Jane is playing drums and percussion; she’s really great.
“She can strip down to a washboard for the more rootsy stuff, or play full kit. She has made a little kick drum out of an old suitcase with just one hi-hat on it. So we’re experimenting with different ways to break down and play a little bluegrass set in the middle of the show. And then, finally, Vanessa McGowan is an amazing bass player. She’s going to be playing upright and electric, depending on what the song wants.
“We had no intention of making an all-female band. It was literally just the best people for each possible position in the band and the instrumentation that I needed. And then all of a sudden we’re like, ‘Wow, we got an all‑female band. That’s pretty cool.’ It’s like an added perk.”
- So Long Little Miss Sunshine is out now via Nonesuch.
- This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
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