FROM SILICON VALLEY TO THE NASHVILLE MESS AROUND – MEET MOLLY TUTTLE, ROOTS PRODIGY
MOLLY TUTTLE, singer-songwriter, musical prodigy and a leading light of the newest wave of roots-Americana, is telling MOJO about a podcast she just recorded. “It’s with Tim Armstrong of Rancid. I do have a soft spot for punk rock.” She did a cover of Rancid’s Olympia, WA on her last album. “But I heard so much old-time music and bluegrass growing up, I always knew I wanted to play it.”
Tuttle, who lives in Nashville, was born and raised in suburban Palo Alto, south of San Francisco and deep in Silicon Valley. “I miss the California dreaming,” she sings in San Francisco Blues on her new, third album,
Crooked Tree. Hers was a musical home, “instruments everywhere”. Her siblings all played too; father Jack Tuttle, a music teacher and performer, learned bluegrass as a child in rural Illinois from his banjo-playing father.
Molly’s first instrument was the fiddle. “I saw my dad playing one and I really wanted to play, but after a couple of lessons I didn’t have the discipline.” She was four. At eight she started playing guitar – “a lot more fun” – and at 11 did her first gig with the family at a pizza parlour down the street, “bluegrass standards. I loved working out my guitar solos”. At 13, she made her recording debut: a 2007 album of duets with her dad called The Old Apple Tree.
The title Crooked Tree came from something Tom Waits said: that crooked trees live longer than straight ones because lumberjacks don’t want to cut them down. Tuttle’s solo career might fit that description. “It has been kind of unusual,” she says. After getting accolades for her 2019 full-length solo debut When You’re Ready – a lovely album of original folk-Americana – she released a covers album,
But I’d Rather Be With You (2020). As she points out, it was lockdown, with the studios closed and everything on hold, so she taught herself ProTools and came up with a home-made album of some favourite songs.
In 2017, as Tuttle was about to release her crowd-funded debut EP, the International Bluegrass Music Association named her Guitar Player Of The Year, the first woman to receive the award. Inarguably a virtuoso, her biggest influences, she says, are Tony Rice, Clarence White, and David Rawlings.
“[Rawlings is] really unique, with a really unusual guitar, and the way he plays it is emotional and captivating. I was interested in guitar players who found cool ways to accompany a vocalist, because I wanted to be able to accompany myself when I sing and not just strum all the time.”
Rawlings’ partner Gillian Welch guests on Tuttle’s new album’s cowgirl song, Side Saddle. “She came into the studio and sang and I remember she smelled really good. She made the whole studio smell good!” Tuttle laughs. “She seems like a very magical person.” Other guests on the album include Margo Price, recent MOJO Rising star Billy Strings, and Tuttle’s friends Old Crow Medicine Show. And, of course, singing with her on the closing song, Grass Valley, her father Jack.
Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway’s Crooked Tree is out April 1 on Nonesuch.