Chelsea Rochelle
Audio By Carbonatix
Grammy-winning bluegrass artist Molly Tuttle may not have played her first gig at a pizza shop in Menlo Park, California, as the Grateful Dead did in 1965, when the band was known as the Warlocks. But the Bay Area native’s first show was in a pizza store, and she does love the Dead.
“I think about them a lot because I’m from Palo Alto and my first show ever was at a pizza store down the road from my house,” Tuttle says. “That’s just really cool because when I think about, like, ‘How do I have any sort of place in this music that people associate with Kentucky and the South when I’m from California?’ I think [about how] so many great bluegrass records were made out in California. You have, like, Old & In the Way with Jerry Garcia and David Grisman and Peter Rowan, and so many of the albums that I grew up listening to that taught me about this music. I do think about the Grateful Dead a lot, and I’ve gotten to meet Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann recently, and it’s been really cool to kind of talk Bay Area with them. Bill Kreutzmann went to the same high school that I did in Palo Alto.”
Tuttle now lives in Nashville, and is increasingly becoming part of the legacy of American music there. However, she says the California coast still inspires her music, including her new album, City of Gold, even if bluegrass is more often associated with rural communities and mountain ranges.
“I think the ocean has been something that’s always felt inspiring to me,” she reflects. “I love that my happy place is going to the beach, especially in Northern California, where it feels so wild still, and you can just drive along the coast and find all these little hidden-away beaches where there might not be any other people. It has this mysterious quality to it, to me, where you can look out and it seems to go on forever. It makes me feel creative, and I get excited about using the ocean as a metaphor in songs. I’m sure there’s lots of bluegrass songs that reference the sea, but it’s not the most common topic.”
Tuttle – a singer, songwriter, guitarist and acclaimed banjo player – made her first record with her dad at age thirteen and joined her family band, The Tuttles, two years later. She studied for two years at the Berklee College of Music and got the rest of her education on the road and in recording studios, gaining skills and steam with one foot in formal education.
“I think some people are just born ready to go out on the road, and [when] I got out of high school, I needed time to just kind of study my craft,” Tuttle explains. “I was so excited at the prospect of going to music school, because I knew I would meet so many like-minded people, and in a way that was the best part. My band now is so many people I met through going to Berklee. I don’t think I’ve gotten that experience since then, where I just fully immersed myself in studying and playing music, and I only went for two and a half years, which felt like the perfect amount of time. I didn’t fully, like, get a bachelor’s degree, but it still gave me a little window in between high school and the real world where I could just totally focus. And then I moved to Nashville and started making records.”
City of Gold is her fourth studio album, and follows 2022’s Crooked Tree, which won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. She’s played with everyone from Béla Fleck to Billy Strings, and since her debut LP, When You’re Ready, dropped in 2019, she’s been releasing records at a pace of about one per year. Tuttle says each album is a snippet of that time in her life, but she doesn’t feel the pressure to make it a synopsis of everything she’s experienced and learned.
“I have to go about thinking about it as a moment, because if I put so much pressure on it, like, ‘This has to define who I am,’ I start thinking about, ‘Oh, my God – it’s gonna be on Spotify forever.’ I start getting freaked out, like, ‘Well, I wish I could have done that differently or sang that line differently,'” she admits. “When you put out an album, you haven’t toured the songs, so you might not have played them a million times, and then you play them for a year on the road and you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to go back and re-record the album now that I know [the songs] better.’
“These songs [from City of Gold] – I wrote them all in the past year after putting out Crooked Tree,” she continues. “I was getting so excited about playing with my new band, and I was like, ‘Oh, man, I really need to write an album for this band specifically,’ because on Crooked Tree we had all these amazing heroes of mine playing on the album, but when I went to make my touring band, they were all in other bands. So I put together this band of a bunch of my friends and people who I just thought would make a really interesting sound together. It worked so well, so I’ve been having a blast out on the road and am excited to have our first record together.”
Tuttle plays the 51st annual RockyGrass Festival at Planet Bluegrass Ranch in Lyons on Sunday, July 30, and says she’s felt connected to Colorado for a long time.
“I feel like the best bluegrass fans are out here,” she says. “I love coming to Colorado and playing music, and it feels kind of like home to me because I grew up out west in California, and it’s just kind of like, you have the beauty of the mountains, which I miss about my home state, and everyone really loves nature, which I resonate with. Anytime we play a show [in Colorado], people are just so into it, and I feel like there’s just an audience that really appreciates the music that I play.”
RockyGrass, with Molly Tuttle and others, Friday, July 28, through Sunday, July 30, Planet Bluegrass Ranch, 500 West Main Street, Lyons. Tickets are $100-$235 at bluegrass.com/rockygrass.
