Molly Tuttle - When You're Ready

By 2019 Molly Tuttle had collected the trophies that usually define a career in this world: two IBMA Guitar Player of the Year wins, the first woman ever to take that award, plus Instrumentalist of the Year at the Americana Music Awards. When You're Ready is what she did with that. Rather than make the technical showcase everyone expected, she made an Americana record with pop bones and put the songs first.

"Take The Journey" is the calling card, driven by clawhammer momentum and one of the most immediately recognisable guitar figures she has written. "Million Miles" brings Jason Isbell in on harmony. "Sit Back And Watch It Roll" features Billy Strings, then a few years from being a household name in his own right. "Clue" stretches past five minutes and closes the album on something genuinely strange, more atmosphere than bluegrass. Ryan Hewitt, who has worked with the Avett Brothers and the Lumineers, produced at Sound Emporium and House of Blues Studios in Nashville, and gives the record a width that most debut bluegrass-adjacent albums never get near.

Everything Tuttle has done since, the Grammy-winning Golden Highway records and the plugged-in rock turn that followed, traces back here. This is the album where she decided what kind of artist she wanted to be.

Limited pink and yellow swirl vinyl reissue with download code, on Compass Records.