Guitarist, songwriter and singer Molly Tuttle has become one of bluegrass music’s most respected artists, building her reputation over the years through performances with family band The Tuttles With AJ Lee, solo projects, and her work with Golden Highway (a nod to Tuttle’s California roots). She was also the first woman to win the IBMA’s guitar player of the year award.

Tuttle credits the success of her Grammy-winning albums with Golden Highway—Crooked Tree (2022) and City of Gold (2023)—with helping her “gain that confidence and help me take a risk with my sound,” she tells Billboard.

Her new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, out Friday (Aug. 15) on Nonesuch, is the result of that risk-taking — and marks a radical stylistic evolution from her earlier bluegrass-oriented work. The 12-song album is built on a bedrock of folk-pop, country and rock, while still folding in dashes of bluegrass.

“When we finished the record and I heard it all, I was like, ‘This has Sheryl Crow vibes and I love it.’ She’s my hero,” Tuttle says.

Over the past five years, in between playing more than 100 shows per year with Golden Highway, making her previous two projects (in addition to her solo 2024 EP Into the Wild) and seeing Crooked Tree win the IBMA’s album of the year award, Tuttle was culling songs that landed outside her usual purview. She wrote many of the songs on the new album with her partner, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor.

“Bluegrass is the music I grew up with and that’s such a kind of defined format to me. You can push boundaries, but you are still kind of writing within this established genre,” she says. “I so often write songs that don’t really fit into any specific style of music. I’ve gravitated towards this sound that is a little less defined and that made it scarier to make this album.”

At the suggestion of manager Ken Levitan, Tuttle began sending songs to producer Jay Joyce, known for his work with Cage the Elephant, Miranda Lambert and Eric Church.

“Ken felt he would have cool ideas for pushing my guitar playing in new directions,” she says. “Jay was great about that. He was like, ‘There are going to be a lot of guitar solos on this album.’ I feel like with me, when we are making a record, usually the solos are being passed around in the bluegrass world, a collaborative approach which is also really cool. But with this, it was also challenging when you’re taking longer guitar solos and playing throughout the whole record. You have to spend more time on it and make sure they have an arc of their own.”

Tuttle and Joyce recorded the album last fall at Joyce’s Neon Cross studio in East Nashville, along with drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House and Secor on banjo, fiddle, harmonica, and vocal harmonies.

“We had the drums in the isolation room, so it didn’t bleed into everything, but otherwise, we were all sitting there in the control room,” Tuttle says. “Usually when you’re in a studio, the musicians are on one side and the producer and engineers are on the other, but his studio is cool because the console and everything is in the middle, and we just sat around it. You’re all in this big space together.”

The album opens with the stormy “Everything Burns.” “We decided to start things off with a big guitar moment, to kind of set the tone,” Tuttle says. “It’s still going to have that throughline of my guitar playing and it’s a singer-songwriter record, but it’s also a guitar record. The song kind of takes people by surprise. It’s one of the moodiest songs on the record, but it gets happier after that.”

Indeed, the album brightens throughout the following 11 songs, including the pop-fueled “That’s Gonna Leave a Mark,” the sunny “Summer of Love,” and a cover of Icona Pop and Charli XCX’s 2012 hit “I Love It.” Elsewhere, songs such as “No Regrets” and “Golden State of Mind” delve into the emotional maturity and acceptance that come as the years progress.

Her guitar-playing is as self-assured and precise as ever. Tuttle also plays banjo on “No Regrets” and album closer “Story of My So-Called Life,” something she hasn’t done on her records since she was a teenager.

“Story of My So-Called Life” traces her journey from attending Boston’s Berklee College of Music to chasing her musical dreams. “Old Me (New Wig)” finds her opening up about moving away from habits and thoughts that aren’t self-beneficial.

“It’s a little tongue-in-cheek,” she admits. “We thought we were just writing your kind of a breakup song, but we got to the chorus and we suddenly realized, ‘Maybe this is about breaking up with an old version of yourself that isn’t really serving you anymore–your insecurities or bad habits or anything that you need to leave behind. It’s probably my favorite of the new songs to play because I have people in the audience coming up to me and being like, ‘I have things that I’m struggling with or trying to leave in the past.’ It was just fun to come up with the line, ‘I got a new wig to get you out of my hair.’”

The album’s cover artwork also plays into that idea, featuring photos of Tuttle in an array of wigs—and one photo with no wig—with each photo tying in with a song on the album. A blonde wig with a braid links to a line from the song “Rosalee,” while a dark wig represents “Everything Burns.” But the center photo showcases a bald Tuttle staring straight ahead at the camera. It’s a bold, confident statement for the singer-songwriter, who lost her hair when she was three due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata.

“It’s nice for me because I feel like I can just have fun with it and not constantly have to explain and have people feel sorry for me,” she says. “I don’t have hair. It’s just grown into something that is part of my creative expression, wearing different wigs and stuff like that. And that’s taken me a long time to get to that point. So, it was fun to kind of celebrate that on the new album cover.”

The cover was inspired by Tuttle’s work with Ringo Starr on his country-inflected album, Look Up, earlier this year, with Tuttle taking a nod from the cover of the Beatles’ 1970 classic Let It Be.

“That album just had these four squares of each member’s face. At first, I thought about wearing maybe four different wigs, then it turned into nine. It was an ambitious photo shoot and it took 12 hours to get all of them shot, but I loved how it turned out.”

The new album isn’t the only major musical shift Tuttle has made this year. Golden Highway, which also included bassist Shelby Means, banjoist Kyle Tuttle (no relation), fiddle player Bronwyn Keith-Hynes and mandolin player Dominick Leslie, disbanded earlier this year to focus on solo initiatives and other pursuits. Keith-Hynes, Means and Kyle Tuttle each launched solo projects over the past year.

“It felt like a good time to put the brakes on for all of us,” Tuttle says of the group’s dissolvement.

Tuttle formed a new outfit for her current tour dates, which include summer festival shows and this fall’s The Highway Knows Tour. The new group features drummer Megan Jane, bassist Vanessa McGowan, multi-instrumentalist Ellen Angelico and guitar/mandolin player Mary Meyer. They played their first show together at New York’s Mercy Lounge in May.

But Tuttle doesn’t rule out a Golden Highway reunion. “My hope is that we’ll get together again and play more shows in the future whenever everyone wants to,” Tuttle says. “I think when we do get back together, it’ll be with a schedule that works for everyone. I’m hopeful that it’s just kind of goodbye for now and we’ll be back.”