To say that a lot has happened since Molly Tuttle last appeared on The String in 2019 would be an understatement. She’s won two Grammy Awards and been nominated for two more. She won her first IBMA Female Vocalist of the Year Award, to go along with her two groundbreaking Guitar Player trophies. But most important, she’s been through two entire stylistic swings in her musical vision and recording career. And she got engaged to Ketch Secor. So we cover a lot of ground in our latest conversation.
Molly Tuttle’s career is fascinating and dynamic whether you look at the micro or the macro. Up close, she’s a subtle flatpick guitar player and singer who’s won her awards and laurels with finesse and phrasing. Looked at from a distance, she’s an artist staying one step ahead of expectations while still growing her audience. In fact, she’s made two major stylistic shifts in the six years since she was last on The String, so it seemed important to have her back to start off 2026.
Actually, her first appearance was in a multi-guest hour in 2017 when she was one of three rising stars of bluegrass, alongside Nashville mandolinist Casey Campbell and a guy newly moved in from Michigan named Billy Strings. Then we heard her story of growing up in California and a family band led by her music teacher dad. By the time of her first full-length interview two years later, she’d won two ground-breaking IBMA Awards for Guitar Player of the Year and the Americana Instrumentalist of the Year award.
With the bluegrass community nationwide and her home-state California Bluegrass Association behind her and cheering her on, Tuttle dropped her debut full-length album in 2018, and it was not what many were expecting. When You’re Ready on Compass Records was a tuneful, graceful acoustic pop and singer-songwriter album. Yet its quality overwhelmed any where’s-the-bluegrass backlash. She did tell me at the time: “I love traditional bluegrass, so I understand where people are coming from who might not resonate with my new album as much. My favorite bluegrass was made before 1960, so I understand. But it's not going to stop me from doing whatever music I want to do. I'm sure I'll make bluegrass records in the future."
How right she was. After the pandemic slowed her down and gave her time to have a little fun (making a remotely recorded album of rock and pop covers with plenty of guitar picking), she emerged with a new vision, a batch of potent new songs, and the new string band Golden Highway. We learn in this interview that Ketch Secor, whom she started dating around 2021, urged her to go bluegrass, an interesting twist. I called that album, Crooked Tree, not just excellent but historic in its timing and range of quality songwriting. It netted her the first of two Best Bluegrass Album awards at the Grammys and launched almost three years of touring.
The band worked so well together and was so in demand that they made a follow-up album called City Of Gold. Whereas Crooked Tree was recorded in 2021 with a large group of top tier bluegrass session cats, this one showed what a tight and energetic unit the Golden Highway band had become. It also won a Grammy, this time with the band members sharing in the prize.
So it was a surprise when in May of last year Tuttle announced that Golden Highway was going on hiatus and that she’d hired a new all-woman band (with drums) to tour her newest record, So Long Little Miss Sunshine. How she zeroed in on this hybrid indie pop sound is a core part of this conversation, and a lot of it had to do with seeking out renowned producer Jay Joyce, a chart-topping country and rock collaborator of Carrie Underwood, Little Big Town, and Keith Urban, as well as Patty Griffin and Brandy Clark. It seems like a match that had to happen for Molly.
“I looked at his discography, and he'd worked with a lot of my heroes, but he'd also had a very eclectic (career). And I liked that because I don't really feel like my music can fit into one of these Nashville boxes,” she says. “But I also really like that he's a guitar player, and when I started working with him, he just had so many ideas for my guitar parts on the record.”
That’s apparent from the opening bars of Sunshine - a 30-second acoustic guitar solo that launches the song “Everything Burns” with fire and silver. Then on a suite of songs mostly co-written with Secor, she builds a sonic world that’s not easy to compare with anyone. It’s not bluegrass, but it’s also not Sabrina Carpenter. Somehow she’s split the difference. And she tells us that the festivals and venues that booked her last band are having her back, and she’s ready to meet the audience where they are with a show that covers all her influences.
“I feel like in the past few years, bluegrass as a genre has totally opened up to all these different types of audiences,” she says. “So I don't know if this new sound or new band is really bringing me anywhere that I feel like I wasn't already playing bluegrass music. Because I feel like people have become so much more open minded to acoustic music and bluegrass. So it's just kind of expanded what I can do in my show.”
Watch Molly Tuttle compete for Grammy Awards for Best Americana Album and Best Americana Performance at the Premiere Ceremony on YouTube on Feb. 1 starting at 2:30 pm CT.
Watch Molly Tuttle and her new (unnamed) band perform "Everything Burns" from So Long Little Miss Sunshine, recorded live on August 16, 2025 at the Green Mountain Bluegrass and Roots Festival in Manchester Center, VT.
