Grammy Award-winning artist Molly Tuttle to perform at The Englert

Molly Tuttle won the Best Bluegrass Album Grammy two years running for her 2022 album “Crooked Tree” and her 2023 follow-up “City of Gold,” and was the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award.

So, why did she feel compelled to turn away from bluegrass to a mixture of country and pop on “So Long Little Miss Sunshine,” the album she released in August?

“It's just kind of what I was called to do, musically, the songs I was writing,” Tuttle said in a mid-September interview. “There’s no real reason other than that's what I wanted to do. I've always played lots of different styles of music, even as a kid growing up. I started off playing bluegrass, but was always like listening to other genres and learning songs and different styles and writing songs that didn't really fit into bluegrass.”

In fact, Tuttle pointed out that she’s only made two bluegrass records — which happen to be Grammy winners — and that, unlike those records, which she made with her band Golden Highway, “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” is a solo effort that “felt like it wanted to be its only thing.”

Many of the songs on the new album are more personal than Tuttle’s previous work, and others show off her storytelling skills, from the murder ballad “Rosalee” to the breakup song “Easy” that is rooted in family drives through California when she was a kid.

“I did grow up going on road trips through there and listening to Buck Owens, but never broke up with someone in Bakersfield,” Tuttle said. “Then there's other songs, like ‘The Story of My So-Called Life,’ which is very autobiographical, or 'Golden State of Mind,' which is just very nostalgic for me thinking about where I grew up, in California.”

“Golden State of Mind” also sounds Californian, ‘70s pop that’s tinged with just a touch of country. Other songs on the album tilt the balance more toward country.

But nearly all of them feature Tuttle’s acoustic guitar that’s as rootsy, flashy and impressive as anything she’s recorded.

“What we wanted to put front and center was the guitar,” she said. “It’s kind of a singer songwriter record, but it's also definitely my guitar record, because I'm the only one really taking solos throughout the entire album, which was kind of a fun challenge for me,”

Tuttle, who’s known for her flatpicking, clawhammer and crosspicking, has had a guitar in her hands since she was a child, growing up in Palo Alto, California.

“I started off when I was eight years old,” she said. “My dad's a guitar teacher, and he teaches all different instruments. He teaches all the bluegrass instruments, but I always gravitated toward the guitar. He was always showing me stuff around the house, and he would tell me, like, you know, you need to practice a lot if you want to get good at it.

“So I was always practicing as much as I could as a kid, and, you know, just kind of was really devoted to playing the guitar from a pretty early age, and then in high school, I kind of decided I wanted to pursue music as a career,” Tuttle elaborated. “I wasn't like the best student in high school, but I did work really hard at guitar.”

At 15, Tuttle joined her father and brothers in the family band The Tuttles, and, after graduating from high school in 2011, studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

In 2015, she moved from Boston to Nashville, began to get noticed as a guitarist and released her debut album in 2019. After putting together her “dream band,” Golden Highway, she released her two Grammy winners.

So what will those who turn up for Tuttle’s show hear?

“We're playing about six or seven songs a night off the new record, and the rest is off my other record, a lot of bluegrass stuff, reworking some of them,” Tuttle said. “There are a couple songs off the last two records that work with drums and electric guitar as well as fiddle and mandolin. So it’s kind of like a hybrid of bluegrass, a little bit electrified. Then we do a stripped-down portion of the set where we gather around one mic that’s fully acoustic.

“It's been cool because it adds this whole new dynamic to the set where we're getting louder than I ever have before, and then we're getting quiet, and people seem to be responding really well,” she said.

The “we” is Tuttle and her “happy surprise” all-female band.

“When I put the band together, I just kind of started reaching out to people, and it just came together in that way,” she said in Zoom conversation from a New York hotel. “It was just kind of a happy surprise. It was not intentional, but we're having a lot of fun on the road. I’m really grateful for it.

“Last night. Last night, I left all my entire makeup bag in an Uber. I only realized about two hours before the show, which is usually when I start putting on my makeup. I was like, ‘Oh my God. if I didn't have other women in the band, I don't know what I would have done,” Tuttle said. “Luckily, I was able to borrow stuff from them. I was like, ‘This is crazy.’”

Tuttle’s already written a handful of songs for her next album, which she hopes to begin working on early next year. One burning question is will she take the next step and pick up an electric guitar?

“I feel like I freaked out people enough with my new record, so to take it even farther, who knows,” she said. “I'm not the best electric player because I'm not used to it. But it is kind of something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I have played it here and there a little bit. That would be fun.”