Molly Tuttle is a star of the US bluegrass scene whose last couple of albums have broadened her appeal. On them she wandered into country, folk, and rock. She featured the likes of Gillian Welch, Dave Matthews and Old Crow Medicine Show, intimating, perhaps, a desired trajectory.
Her latest album, her fifth solo, tones down these tendencies in favour, much of the time, of a gentler, smoother direction. While it doesn’t imitate Taylor Swift, there’s something of that superstar’s pop-country style and relationship lyricism.
“Mistakes, bad dates, man, I’ve had a few/Cheap thrills, bitter pills, I could use a redo,” runs the opening to love song “No Regrets”. Tuttle is splitting with a wrong’un. As she is also on “Easy”. There’s much in this vein, light, well-produced band-made pop, with acoustic guitars, mandolins and banjos twinkling but not forefronted. It’s music one could imagine appealing to female high school ears in way that Tuttle’s previous music didn’t.
Some such material fully engages. The shuffling, floaty ode to optimism, “Golden State of Mind” is a lovely thing, and her melancholic, low-key cover of Icona Pop & Charli XCX’s “I Love It” drifts into Paris, Texas steel guitar territory. But the strummed West Coast-flavoured ode to the ethos of the 1960s, "Summer of Love", is a nice idea that doesn’t fly as high as it might.
Not all So Long Little Miss Sunshine is in the forementioned vein. Opener “Everything Burns” is classic Tuttle, a raging, finger-pickin’ anti-Trump anthem (“A fool with a fire and a poison pen/A mob full of half-a-million angry men”), “Rosalee” is catchy country storytelling, redolent of Bobbie Gentry, and “Old Me (New Wig)” is a zippy folk rock’n’roller making passing reference to Tuttle’s alopecia (as does the cover art). There are a few more in this vein too.
This writer’s preference, as you can likely tell, is for the latter kind of material. But, with the rest, she’s not deserted her muse, merely broadened her palette, taken it somewhere new. It’s an experiment, less to my taste, but if it brings her sparkling talent to wider attention, a worthwhile one.
Below: watch Molly Tuttle play an acoustic version of "The Highway Knows" from her So Long Little Miss Sunshine album
