During the summer of 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, Molly Tuttle wrote “Everything Burns,” with partner and collaborator Old Crow Medicine Show frontman Ketch Secor. The politically-charged song was one she considered “dark” and put it in a folder, later revisiting it and recording it the day after the 2025 election. The song circled back from the time she wrote it with a country that felt divided and other socio-political rifts, and was one of the first tracks on Tuttle’s fifth album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine.
Five years in the making, following Tuttle’s back-to-back Grammy-winning Crooked Tree (2022) and City of Gold from 2023 with her band Golden Highway, and her 2024 EP Into the Wild, So Long Little Miss Sunshine is the California-born and Nashville-based singer and songwriter’s most personal collection of stories.
“I was writing songs I felt were in two different worlds that were a little more contemporary and personal, and ended up on this record, ” says Tuttle. “And then I was suddenly getting this creative spark to write bluegrass songs. Amid all the chaos of the pandemic, that’s where I felt like the ideas were flowing and everything was coming together.”
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A departure from her more bluegrass roots, So Long Little Miss Sunshine dips Tuttle into pop and rock, and needed time to evolve before it was recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce (Lainey Wilson, Orville Peck, Cage the Elephant).
“Making the last two records that were in my wheelhouse, going back to my roots of growing up playing bluegrass, helped me gain confidence to venture outside and take my playing and songwriting in new directions,” shares Tuttle, who admits to having some trepidations around moving out of her bluegrass territory.
Everything was more personal, including the album cover, shot by photographer Ebru Yildiz, featuring Tuttle wearing nine different wigs, an exaggerated nod to the four-square classic cover of the Beatles’ Let It Be. Earlier in 2025, Tuttle also played guitar and sang on former Beatle Ringo Starr‘s country album Look Up. A spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation, Tuttle has been bald since the age of 3 due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata.
So Long Little Miss Sunshine comes a long way since Tuttle’s 2019 debut, When You’re Ready, from the rhythmic “Everything Burns” to the sentimental shimmer of “Golden State Of Mind,” and past close connections that faded away. The self-explanatory and cheekier “Old Me (New Wig)” carries on the autobiographical line of shedding what no longer serves one—So long, little Miss Sunshine / Adios to my used-to-be / Leave you behind, no time for goodbye.
“There are a lot of songs about figuring out who you are and journeying through life,” says Tuttle. “And there are some coming-of-age themes in there as well, of just stepping into myself a little bit more and exploring different sides of my life and who I am as an artist.”
In between moments of self-discovery and the journeys in life—”Oasis,” “The Highway Knows,” Easy”—midway into these ruminations is a cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s 2012 hit “I Love It.”
So Long Little Miss Sunshine closes on more moments of self-alignment with “No Regrets,” the final song Tuttle wrote for the album, and the uptempo pop close of “Story of My So-Called Life,” recounting earlier days and relocating from Boston to Nashville. This is the story I was meant to write, sings Tuttle, Let’s start from the beginning / Don’t tell me how it’s going to end tonight / Just let me keep on living.
Both tracks also feature Tuttle on banjo, something she hasn’t done since her teens, and playing in her family’s band The Tuttles with AJ Lee. “I feel like after I’ve said so much in all the other songs,” she says, “it’s just kind of nice to end it on a note of, ‘Here’s how this all came to be.’”
For Tuttle, 2025 has already been marked by a series of highlights, from playing with Starr at the Grand Ole Opry and appearing on a tribute album to zydeco pioneer Clifton Chenier, alongside the Rolling Stones, Steve Earle, and Lucinda Williams, to finally releasing one of her most personal pieces of music to date.
Backed by Secor, who plays fiddle, banjo, and also co-wrote the tracks on So Long Little Miss Sunshine, along with bassist Byron House, drummers and percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, and multi-instrumentalist Joyce, among other musicians, Tuttle also adds her acoustic guitar to the mix.
“It’s kind of therapeutic to have this full picture of myself and all the different things I do musically, as well as lyrically,” Tuttle shares. “It tells a story of who I am, and that’s one of the reasons I gravitated towards music as a young person. It was a way of expressing myself when I felt like it was hard to.”
Now, Tuttle has parted ways with her past self and old patterns, but still plans to return to her bluegrass project Golden Highway when the bug bites. “I’m feeling so inspired,” she says, “There are no boundaries to what I do. I’ll always play bluegrass, but I’m loving the freedom of experimenting with new sounds and not feeling like there are any roles.”
Photo: Ebru Yildiz
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