Molly Tuttle - ….But I'd Rather Be With You

  by Zena Grieg

published: 6 / 10 / 2020

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Review

Following her 2019 debut album ‘When You’re Ready’, Nashville-based Californian singer and guitarist Molly Tuttle has followed up with a new album, '...But I’d Rather Be With You'. She was the first woman to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year Award (2017), winning this again the following year as well as being named Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year. During lockdown Tuttle worked remotely with LA-based producer Tony Berg, learning to use Pro Tools to record and engineer the new album’s ten tracks, then sending them through to Berg, who assembled session musicians to remotely add their parts from home studios. The new album is a collection of covers, with Tuttle, who has made videos for many of the tracks, revisiting many favourite songs which she says “reminded me why I so love music.” The collection opens with a cover of The National’s ‘Fake Empire’, Tuttle’s guitar virtuosity and insistent vocals – “We’re half awake in a fake empire” - against a backdrop of social activism across mid-20th century America, interspersed with images of forest fires, stars and dreamlike images, a song fusing past protests with contemporary dislocation and disquiet. It moves to a feminist take on the Rolling Stones' ‘She’s A Rainbow’. This is set to Tuttle’s jaunty guitar-picking with images of her with and without hair (having alopecia, she is an active advocate, raising awareness), appearing in a rainbow of different people holding placards on what feminism, equality and the impact of intersectionality means to them. Whether in her understated, thoughtful version of FKA Twigs’ ‘Mirrored Heart’, channelling its despair and sorrow, or in quiet, powerful renditions of Karen Dalton’s ‘Something On Your Mind’ or in her lively country interpretation of the 1990s pop punk band Rancid’s ‘Olympia,WA’, and the raw emotions in the powerful closer ‘How Can I Tell You?’ by Cat Stevens, Tuttle effortlessly takes the listener on a musical journey of surprising shifts. The album with its ten tracks spanning decades and the musical spectrum is, Tuttle explains, “meant to be a timestamp, capturing this unique moment in the world when all of us have had to find ways to keep going in the face of this terrible pandemic.” A kaleidoscope of sound and emotions, this is an eclectic, vibrant collection, with well-known tracks imaginatively reinvented. It is an album to lift the soul, precursing a promised forthcoming album of new Tuttle songs.

Track Listing:-

1 Fake Empire
2 She's A Rainbow
3 A Little Lost
4 Something On Your Mind
5 Mirrored Heart
6 Olympia, WA
7 Standing On The Moon
8 Zero
9 Sunflower, Vol. 6
10 How Can I Tell You