Interview: Molly Tuttle Prepares to Make Her Return to FreshGrass with Golden Highway
The last day of summer this year is September 22, and already in New England the leaves have been changing their color. There’s been a few days where it’s fitting to wear a sweater or a hoodie and before we know it, fall will have arrived. When it comes to the festival season around the region, there’s an event that signals this change in the most jovial of ways. It’s called FreshGrass and it’s coming back to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams (aka MASS MoCA) from September 20 until summer’s eventual finale. There’s going to be an array of talented acts taking part, including Shakey Graves, The Devil Makes Three, Drive-By Truckers, Steel Pulse, Béla Fleck, Adia Victoria and many others.
One of those others is Molly Tuttle, who is going to be performing on Joe’s Field with her backing band Golden Highway to close out FreshGrass’ final day at 3:40pm. We had a talk ahead of the festival about her musical upbringing, being the first woman to win a prestigious award and a new EP she has coming out.
You come from a musical family with your father Jack being a bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and instructor and your siblings Sullivan and Michael being musicians themselves by playing the guitar and mandolin respectively. How would you describe this unique upbringing while being immersed in music from the day you were born?
I grew up hearing music around the house all the time and my dad had all these guitars lying around on the couches and on the walls. He would sit down and play me songs whenever I wanted to hear some of my favorites, which were usually these bluegrass songs my dad would sing. When I was really little, around the ages of three or four, I wanted to play the fiddle, and I thought I was going to stick with that. When I was eight, I asked my parents for a guitar because I was interested in trying it out. I played piano, but it didn’t really stick with me.
I’m the oldest out of my siblings, so I was the first out of us to start playing music and it became a fun way of bonding with my dad. Then my brothers wanted to get in on it too, so they started playing music, and when I was probably 12 or so, we started playing little gigs around town. These were at pizza shops, places where we’d open for bluegrass bands coming through the area and stuff like that.
You just mentioned that you’ve been playing guitar since the age of eight and you’re also the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year Award, so how did this come about and what was your reaction to winning when it happened?
It was kind of was a surprise and I actually remember where I was when I found out I was nominated. I was back home in California, and it was 2017 or 2018, so I must have been in my early 20s. I was just kind of scrolling through stuff on my phone and I think people were texting me saying “Congratulations!” while I was trying to figure out what happened. I saw that I had been nominated and I was a bit shocked. I had moved to Nashville in 2015, so it was a year or two after that.
I saw someone saying that I was the first woman achieve the nomination, which was really cool as well. I remember thinking how crazy it was that it’s taken this long for a woman to be recognized on the guitar at the Bluegrass Music Awards. Then after that, I was wondering what was actually going to happen at the ceremony and I ended up winning, which was another big surprise. There were a whole lot of questions about being the first woman to win, but I think for me it was just an honor to be up there at all. I grew up going to those award shows and it felt like the biggest thing in the world to me.
I got to see my heroes like Tony Rice and Bryan Sutton win the award, so it was really cool to see my name up there with people I really admired and looked up to.
It must have been a great feeling. Over the past few years, you’ve been performing with your own backing band Golden Highway, so how did this come together and what makes this band stand out for you versus other projects you’ve been involved in?
It really started to come together during the pandemic. I wanted to switch things up, go back to my roots and make a bluegrass record. In the bluegrass world, you’ll often see the name of the artist and then their band name, so I thought that it would be fun to differentiate the record from what I’ve done in the past. From there, I put the band together and we’ve been touring ever since. It’s been really fun to step away from the total solo artist thing and really put a spotlight on these amazing musicians that I’ve been performing with on the road.
What are your thoughts on coming back to North Adams to perform at FreshGrass?
I remember going to play the festival when I was at Berklee while living in Boston and it was my highlight of the year, I loved going to the FreshGrass Festival. Berklee would send us in different configurations for these couple slots they had for student bands. I did the band contest a few times and I think one time I got second place or something, but it was always such an exciting time. I got to see all my friends and we all would have the best weekend together while hanging out and performing on the different stages. To me, I felt that it was the coolest festival I had ever been to, so to come back and headline is pretty surreal.
I’m excited to reunite with the New England scene and come back to a festival that I have so many fond memories of.
FreshGrass is great, I’ve always enjoyed myself when I’ve gone out there. You and Golden Highway have a new EP titled Into The Wild that’s being released on the same day as the start of the festival, so what’s the vision behind the record and what can people expect from it when it comes out?
A few songs on the EP were originally song scraps from the making of our previous record City of Gold that weren’t fully fleshed out. Then I finished writing them, tweaked them a little bit and I thought they would be cool to include for a deluxe version of the album, but we also have all these covers that we’ve been playing out on the road. Some of them were already recorded while others we had been kicking around as these miscellaneous versions of songs that we hadn’t properly released on either a physical format or as a collection. It just kind of came together as a standalone EP then as part of a deluxe album, but in my mind, it’s a continuation of our last record with the original songs that are tied to the sound and themes of City of Gold. There’s also a cover in there that we haven’t played live yet, which is “Here in California” by Kate Wolf.
It’s one that I grew up playing, I’m a huge fan of hers and I wanted to pay tribute because she’s inspired so many other songs, including the title track for the EP. I felt like those all fit together with our previous record and I also included a version of “Stranger Things” from City of Gold that’s a little more stripped down and spooky sounding.
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