Molly Tuttle – When You’re Ready
Compass – 5 April 2019
An acclaimed bluegrass performer and teacher, renowned for her clawhammer banjo and cross-picking guitar work, Molly Tuttle was not only the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award in 2017, but she did it again in 2018. As such, now signed to Compass, her debut solo album isn’t what you might have expected, assuming, that is, you expected it to showcase her bluegrass roots.
Instead, it’s a very radio-friendly collection of folksy Americana with very few hints of the Appalachian banjo tradition that more conjures thoughts of the Indigo Girls than Hazel Dickens, one of her formative influences. This isn’t a criticism, simply an observation, though it might raise a few eyebrows among those who bought 2017’s Rise or her EP with John Mailander. Indeed, she doesn’t play a single banjo note on the album.
Constructed around various stages in a relationship, from initial courtship to post break up fall out, it opens with the dreamy, mid-tempo guitar picking and piano accompanied Million Miles, an unfinished Jewel number she brought to fruition, on which she’s joined by an all-star cast that includes Jason Isbell on backing vocals, Rachel Baiman on violin, fellow bluegrass name Sierra Hull on mandolin and, contributing electric guitar throughout, Kris Donegan.
There’s more of a bluegrass feel to the guitar picking opening of Take The Journey but, featuring Mike Webb on organ, it quickly resolves into a bluesier, rhythmically urgent number with Jerry Roe’s drums driving it along. Featuring Butterfly Boucher on backing vocals, the tumbling chords of Make My Mind Up with its hook chorus and Donegan’s solo is especially country pop.
Nat Smith on cello, the title track slows the pace down for a tender ballad about being there with an open door when the object of her affection is ready to step through. Things don’t seem to work out, however, and it’s immediately followed by The High Road, a light and gently breezy co-write with Sarah Siskind, Glenn Worf contributing uptight bass with Brittany Haas on fiddle, about parting and travelling different roads “not knowing if we’ll ever meet again.”
The mood’s sustained on the breathily sung on the temperate walking beat country ballad pop of Don’t Let Go with its cascading vocals title line refrain, but then a rockier note sounds on the catchy Light Came In (Power Went out) which, with circling electric guitar from Lonegan, wouldn’t sound out of place on a Susannah Hoffs or early Belinda Carlisle album.
Messed With My Mind returns to a bluesy groove as the relationship falls apart (“you had your chance and you blew it”), though it should be pointed out that when she visits the fortune teller the line she sings is “all she gave me was a bucket of lies” and not what it sounds like she says!
Again featuring Baiman on fiddle, Boucher on backing vocals and Smith’s cello, with Roe laying down a muted drum thump backing, Sleepwalking floats on an undulating rhythm with another sway-along chorus, though the line “bad habits burn like TV static” is perhaps not one of her best.
Co-written with Kai Welch, another number sung in a breathy husk, Sit Back and Watch It Roll talks of how “the sky was dark with thunder and rain”, an image underscored by the brooding organ, percussion, Hull’s mandolin and Ed Roth on piano. Jonathan Dreyfuss providing the strings, it ends in fine ballad form with the five-minute slow waltzing, reflective Clue, a recurring image of music on the radio serving to stir both memory and yearning of lost love, Tuttle’s voice and guitar work soaring to stellar heights.
For the past seven years, the bluegrass community has had Tuttle to itself. It’s time to share her with a much wider world. She’s ready.