Review Summary: Good golly Miss Molly
Every artist of X genre has at some point stood at the crossroads between air-quotes innovation and sticking-to-the-formula, a fact that holds no less true in the metamodern shine of nugrass, contemporary country, American folk, what-have-you. And lest you think I’m engaging in the heresy of false dichotomy here, the course of action that has so often led to genuine classic works in the past has been more of a both/and approach, a cutting across that supposed crossroad that first requires the fulfillment or mastery of a given style before true growth and innovation can be made necessary. In bluegrass especially, innovation, if it’s to be well-received for more than a few months, isn’t going to be the product of some Ritalin-addled novelty fetish. This isn’t a genre where innovation is necessarily encouraged, much less rewarded; hell, the entire aesthetic of the thing is a full-fledged celebration of tintype photographs of great aunt Mabel paper-clipped to her recipe for blueberry preserves on top of the DVD copy of O Brother Where Art Thou. All of which is to say that if you ever needed a case-study of why sticking to tried and true practices or, more accurately mastering the themes and structures of a given musical tradition before taking them along new avenues is so crucial to any sort of genuine artistic growth, look no further than Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway.
Tuttle is an artist who’s so easy to like it almost hurts, and let’s start the laundry list of reasons with the absolute talent that she is on her instrument, her dizzying crosspicking skills so polished, precise and lacking in ego that it can just glide by for almost an entire album without it ever being demanded that the listener say “
damn she is talented”, as deserved as it is. Second is that the warmth and polish of her vocal style is only matched by her abilities as a lyricist and storyteller. All of this is amply demonstrated on opener El Dorado, her gold-rush/old west yarn of lost dreams and gold madness. So many times I’d be listening to this album and just noting to myself the total balance of poise and enthusiasm she was bringing to everything, like this is the last singer that anyone could accuse of a lack of commitment; this gal is playing and singing like her life depends on it, like it’s the source of all joy for her.
Lyrically, Tuttle still brings all the life and originality of Crooked Tree, the commonplace country platitudes breathing anew with the verve and precision with which Tuttle places them in her mosaic portraits. I’ve pretty much beaten it to death at this point, but so much of what makes country poetics poignant is the selection of all those well-worn elements, and their placement into new and startling rearrangements, and its something that Molly is completely adept at. If her lyrics don’t hit quite as hard as what Margo Price did with Strays earlier this year, it’s less a product of any failing on Tuttle’s part and more a distance from the confessional poignancy of that earlier effort. Of course Goodbye Mary amply demonstrates that she’s as capable at squeezing blood from stones as anyone, and Alice in the Bluegrass is a delightful down-home riff on the Lewis Carrol tale, all of her songwriting and lyricsmithing done with wit and restraint.
Likewise, Golden Highway is such a goddamn delight as a backing band, their near-virtuosity reined in and cut loose exactly where it’s appropriate, solos and breaks erupting in between the verses cleaner than houndsteeth. If you hear those mandolin arpeggios in Stranger Things, the soloing in Alice in the Bluegrass, the breakneck banjo bash in San Joaquin, you’ll recognize a bunch of blazing talents at the absolute top of their game. That it all plays to its strengths so well makes the relatively limited aural palate of the genre such an afterthought in the face of all the excitement and verve that it underlines in red just what a crucial element actual
talent is to any endeavor.
So then, given my middling impression of Colter Wall’s latest, where are the accusations of stagnation, sterility and empty nostalgia? Frankly, they just ain’t there. This is exactly this sort of thing done right, the old stylings shining with all the polish of a restored classic car, nostalgia a vehicle that evokes the present’s connection with the past, rather than just a blithe aping of it. If this album reads as Crooked Tree continued, as a new set of stories built on the same old foundations, I’m glad that the stories are as well-crafted and realized as they were on that album, and if I can’t help but to wish, so very slightly, that Tuttle and co. might probe even a little in some new direction, I can’t fault them for playing everything almost exactly according to the same blueprint as their previous album when they’ve so totally mastered that style here. But there’s kind of the rub: against the false dichotomy of innovation or stagnation lies the other false dichotomy of novelty-for-novelty’s-sake vs. genuine artistic boundary pushing. Growth and evolution is necessary and essential to art in that it reflects the individual response to the ever-shifting evolution of the culture, something I take as a historical reality, and something I think few would disagree with. And where Tuttle has, in the past, made bluegrass her own by cutting her teeth with some of the best musicians in the country and
then forged her unique voice in the broader scene, it can be said that maybe we’re at the point where she could start branching in some new directions without digging up her roots. Here’s hoping she does so. Lord knows if anyone could make it work, it’s a talent as prodigious as this one.
