GRAMMY-winning Molly Tuttle has released her new album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, via Nonesuch Records. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson), the fifth full-length from the singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist is a bold, deeply personal body of work that embraces self-acceptance and reinvention.
The LP’s striking cover features multiple Mollys in different wigs – and one bareheaded – reflecting her lifelong journey with alopecia areata, a condition she’s lived with since age three. Musically, the album ventures into new territory with a vibrant mix of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking – plus a murder ballad and an unexpected cover of Icona Pop and Charli XCX’s “I Love It.” Throughout her signature guitar work shines more prominently than ever before.
“I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time,” Tuttle says. “Part of me was scared to take such a big departure, and that went into the album title. Eventually I decided, ‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think. I’m going to do what I want.’”
Tuttle teased So Long Little Miss Sunshine with lead single “That’s Gonna Leave A Mark” which is her most successful radio track, landing at #1 on Americana Radiowhere it spent four weeks, a career-peak. It also debuted in the Top 20 at AAA and is currently #13, marking her first time on the chart. She performed the song on CBS Saturday where she also sat down with Anthony Mason for a profile – watch that here. She has also shared “Old Me (New Wig),” and “The Highway Knows.” Molly will be appearing on WXPN’s World Cafe today at 2pm ET – tune in here.
Tuttle and her new live band will be on the road for the majority of the remainder of the year, with both headline dates and festival slots, through mid-December. The run encompasses her “The Highway Knows Tour” which officially kicks off on September 10 in Chicago, IL. All dates are listed below and tickets are available here.
On the heels of two Grammy-winning albums in succession, with her band Golden Highway—2022’s Crooked Tree and 2023’s City of Gold—plus a nomination for Best New Artist, Molly Tuttle returns with a solo album that’s her most dazzling to date:So Long Little Miss Sunshine.
Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert, Lainey Wilson, Eric Church, Cage the Elephant), the fifth full album from the California-born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one highly unexpected cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.”
Tuttle’s career, which began at age fifteen, has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. On this album—a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad—she goes to a whole new place. Her stunning guitar work is more up-front on this album than ever before. (One of the most decorated female guitarist alive, Tuttle was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.) So Long Little Miss Sunshine also features Tuttle playing banjo, something she’s never done on one of her albums before.
“I like to be a bit of a chameleon with my music,” she says. “Keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises.”
Tuttle has been slowly building this collection of songs over the last five years, while also writing and releasing two hugely successful albums and a six-song EP (last year’s Into the Wild) and playing more than 100 shows each year with Golden Highway. Along the way she’d send songs to Joyce, who she first started talking to about collaborating on the album a few years ago.
“I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time. Part of me was scared to do such a big departure, and that went into the album title So Long Little Miss Sunshine. It’s like, ‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think. I’m going to do what I want.’”
The album was recorded with a group of musicians that includes drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House, and Joyce on multiple instruments. Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) also plays banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, as well as singing harmony.
Tuttle also conceived the artwork for So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which features multiple Mollys, each wearing a different wig except for one with nothing on her head at all. (“I probably own as many wigs as I own guitars,” she says.) Tuttle has been bald since she was three years old due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata; she acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.
“I love raising awareness,” she says. “I talk about it onstage a lot and broaden it to include anyone who’s ever had something that makes them stick out and look or feel different from others. Playing my song ‘Crooked Tree’ live is very meaningful to me, because it’s a moment where sometimes I’ll take off my wig and talk about my struggles with self-acceptance.”
One album track, “Old Me (New Wig),” is “about leaving all these things behind that don’t serve you anymore,” she says. “Parts of yourself that really aren’t in your best interest, like low self-esteem, anxieties, and not feeling confident. Learning to own these different aspects of my personality but not letting them control me is another theme of the record that inspired the album title and the cover art. Those are all things I’ve struggled with through the years—just feeling like an impostor, like I wasn’t good enough. I like singing this song because there are days when I still have to tell myself to leave that stuff behind.’”
Most of the So Long Little Miss Sunshine songs were co-written with Secor, who is also Tuttle’s partner. “We spend so much time together, we live together, and anytime I have a song idea, or he has one, it’s just so easy to transition from whatever we’re doing into writing a song.”
Although they were written in different times and circumstances, Tuttle found to her surprise that the songs were all tied together by interwoven themes. The opening track, “Everything Burns”—a dark, intense, big-guitar song—was written in 2020, during the chaos and division of the start of the Covid pandemic. It might as easily refer to the current chaos and division in America since Election Day 2024, though. In fact, they recorded it the day after the election.
There are several songs about traveling—sometimes down the open road, like “Highway Knows” and “Oasis”—but also back in time, as on “Easy” and “Golden State of Mind.”
The record also tells “a kind of coming-of-age story,” Tuttle says. “‘Golden State of Mind’ is one of the songs I feel is a through-line to that. It makes me think about people I’ve been close to in the past that I’ve drifted away from, and about growing up and figuring out who you are.”
That theme is in turn picked up in the beautiful ballad “No Regrets,” one of the last songs Tuttle wrote for the album. “It’s about looking back on your life and thinking, ‘Well, maybe I could have done things differently, but if I hadn’t made certain mistakes or gone down certain roads, then I wouldn’t be here.’ And I really like where I am now!”
So Long Little Miss Sunshine closes, as her last two albums did, with an autobiographical song, “Story of My So-Called Life.” “This is me looking back on my life, from growing up to going to school in Boston to moving to Nashville to where I am now—taking stock of all these pivotal moments throughout my life that made me who I am. I feel like after I’ve said so much in all the other songs, it’s just kind of nice to end it on a note of, ‘Here’s how this all came to be,’” she says.
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Earlier this year, Tuttle played guitar and sang on Ringo Starr’s new country album,Look Up. She also played with him and a host of other stellar musical guests at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium and Grand Ole Opry as part of his televised Ringo & Friends shows. She was inspired by his fearlessness in following his passion for country music. “It is cool to see someone like that who has done everything you could imagine doing in a music career and he’s still just so psyched and still has a list of things that he wants to accomplish,” Tuttle says.
Looking back on her own career, Tuttle admits that she also has pursued what interests her: “It has never been a cookie-cutter thing where I’m just going down a straight road. I always had this crooked path.”
Tour Dates:
8/15 – State Theatre – State College, PA
8/16 – Green Mountain Bluegrass & Roots – Manchester Center, VT
8/17 – Point of the Bluff Vineyards – Hammondsport, NY
8/21 – The Ramkat – Winston-Salem, NC
8/22 – Georgia Mountain Fair – Hiawassee, GA
8/23 – Marcus King Family Reunion – North Charleston, SC
8/30 – Rhythm & Roots Festival – Charlestown, RI
“The Highway Knows Tour”
9/10 – Thalia Hall – Chicago, IL
9/11 – Masonic Cathedral Theatre – Detroit, MI
9/12 – Globe Iron – Cleveland, OH
9/13 – Carnegie Homestead Music Hall – Pittsburgh, PA
9/15 – Opera House – Toronto, ON
9/17 – Royale – Boston, MA
9/18 – Brooklyn Steel – Brooklyn, NY
9/20 – XPoNential Music Festival – Philadelphia, PA
9/23 – The Beacon Theatre – Hopewell, VA
9/25 – Greenfield Lake Amphitheatre – Wilmington, NC
9/26 – Cat’s Cradle – Carrboro, NC
9/27 – Orange Peel – Asheville, NC
9/28 – Tennessee Theatre – Knoxville, TN
9/30 – Victory North – Savannah, GA
10/1 – The Plaza Live – Orlando, FL
10/2 – Capitol Theatre – Clearwater, FL
10/3 – Moon Crush (Avett Brothers) – Miramar Beach, FL
10/4 – Variety Playhouse – Atlanta, GA
10/10 – The Hawthorn – St. Louis, MO
10/11 – Liberty Hall – Lawrence, KS
10/12 – Slowdown – Omaha, NE
10/14 – The ELM – Bozeman, MT
10/16 – The Showbox – Seattle, WA
10/17 – Roseland Theater – Portland, OR
10/18 – Holly Theater – Medford, OR
10/19 – Cascade Theatre – Redding, CA
10/24 – Commonwealth Room – Salt Lake City, UT
10/25 – Ogden Theater – Denver, CO
11/2 – Suwannee Hulaween – Live Oak, FL
11/12 – Poplar Hall – Appleton, WI
11/13 – Grand Theater – Wausau, WI
11/14 – Varsity Theatre – Minneapolis, MN
11/15 – Stoughton Opera House – Stoughton, WI
11/16 – Englert Theater – Iowa City, IA
11/18 – Castle Theatre – Bloomington, IL
11/20 – Vogue – Indianapolis, IN
11/21 – Memorial Hall – Cincinnati, OH
11/22 – Athenaeum Theatre – Columbus, OH
11/23 – TBD – Roanoke, VA
12/3 – Antone’s – Austin, TX
12/5 – Marquee Theatre – Tempe, AZ
12/6 – House of Blues – San Diego, CA
12/7 – Arlington Theater – Santa Barbara, CA
12/10 – Rialto Theatre – Tucson, AZ
12/11 – The Fonda – Los Angeles, CA
12/12 – Tower Theatre – Fresno, CA
12/13 – The Fillmore – San Francisco, CA
