Molly Tuttle has been playing guitar since she was eight years old and performing since her early teens. Hailed by many (including progressive bluegrass pioneer Sam Bush) as one of bluegrass’s most promising young stars, Tuttle has since released two solo albums, graced stages alongside genre icons, and nabbed two Guitar Player of the Year awards at the IBMAs—the first woman ever to win the distinction.
Her latest effort, …but i’d rather be with you, just out today, finds the 27-year-old putting her own spin on ten cover songs, showing off her vocal and instrumental chops on everything from the Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Zero.” For the album, which she recorded while sheltering in place at her Nashville home, Tuttle wanted to remind herself what she loved about music—and revisiting some favorite songs seemed like a natural starting point. “I went searching for songs that I felt like I could put my own voice to,” she says. “So I wasn’t really covering artists that people might expect me to.” During the recording process, Tuttle sent clips back-and-forth with the Los Angeles-based producer Tony Berg and enlisted a number of guests, including drummer Matt Chamberlain and Old Crow Medicine Show vocalist Ketch Secor, to contribute recordings from their own home studios.
The slate of well-known musical guests won’t surprise Tuttle’s fans, who are used to seeing her alongside fellow young guns like Billy Strings or Della Mae. But for the delicate “Mirrored Heart,” a song by avant-garde English singer-songwriter FKA Twigs, Tuttle took a solo approach. “That was the last song I worked on for the record, and the only one where I ended up recording all the parts myself,” she says. “I sang all the harmony parts and played the guitar. It’s an intimate song, and that’s what I tried to capture with my version.”
Today, G&G is proud to premiere the video for “Mirrored Heart”—a perfect visual counterpart to the heart-wrenching tune, recorded at the beloved Nashville venue the Basement. “The Basement was actually the first venue I ever played in town, and a really special place to me,” Tuttle explains. The video shows Tuttle, who has alopecia areata, an auto-immune disorder that causes hair loss, performing alone and without a wig in a darkened room to her own reflection. “I want to show that it’s beautiful not to have hair, and it’s okay to just be who you are,” she says. “We brought in the mirror and just made the video really stripped down, just like the arrangement, in an effort to capture the vulnerability of the song.”
Watch the video for “Mirrored Heart” below. Tuttle’s new album is available now.
