Molly Tuttle - So Long Little Miss Sunshine

Two consecutive Grammys for Best Bluegrass Album is a comfortable place to stand. Molly Tuttle stepped off it anyway. So Long Little Miss Sunshine, released in August 2025, is her first record without Golden Highway, cut in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce, and it is a rock album made by someone who happens to be one of the best flatpickers alive. The picking has not gone anywhere. It is just plugged in now.

"Everything Burns" and "That's Gonna Leave A Mark" hit harder than anything else in her catalogue, built on Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham's drums and Byron House's bass with Joyce filling in around the edges. "Golden State Of Mind" and "Summer Of Love" keep the California thread that has run through her writing since City Of Gold. "Old Me (New Wig)" is the most direct she has been about alopecia and reinvention, and it lands with none of the softening the subject usually gets. Eleven originals, much of it co-written with Ketch Secor, plus a genuinely unhinged cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx's "I Love It." There is also a murder ballad, because of course there is.

It is a swing, and swings from artists this decorated are rare. This one connects, mostly because Tuttle's songwriting has been the real story all along and a bigger amp only makes that clearer.

Indie exclusive baby pink 180-gram vinyl on Nonesuch.