MOLLY TUTTLE - ... But I'd Rather Be With You LP (colour vinyl)

Limited edition pink colour vinyl.

It’s a match made in heaven: Tuttle’s inventive, virtuoso guitar playing and her soaring vocals meet some of her favourite songs. She found solace following the 2020 tornado in Nashville and in the midst of the pandemic by revisiting these songs to “remind myself why I love music.” Tuttle recorded and engineered her parts of the songs and then called in the services of drummer Matt Chamberlain, keyboardist Patrick Warren, bassist Gabe Noel, and pedal steel player Rich Hinman to add their parts in their home studios. The result is a small masterpiece that allows Tuttle to stretch out, explore various musical directions and dwell in these songs and make them her own.

The LP opens with The National’s “Fake Empire”; with her finger-picked guitar circling round and round Warren’s reverberating piano, her atmospheric version spirals into the ethereal. Her joyous take on “She’s a Rainbow” features crystalline leads on the song’s instrumental bridge; there’s a moment on the second, and closing, instrumental bridge on which Tuttle, Warren, and Hinman capture the shimmering beauty of the ways that individual droplets of water fall together in sunlight to create a rainbow. The song ends as it begins, with Tuttle’s sparkling, effervescent lead runs. The quiet beauty of the version of Arthur Russell’s “A Little Lost” washes over us with its gently flowing confluence of musical forces; Tuttle’s vocals on the refrain channel Joni Mitchell’s transcendent vocals. Her vocals and musical genius are made for a song such as Karen Dalton’s poignant “Something on Your Mind,” and Tuttle turns this one into her own ballad of grace and emotional gravity. Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor on vocals to the urgent punk rocker “Olympia, WA,” which rides along Noel’s propulsive bass and Tuttle’s swirling lead runs, while her take on the Grateful Dead’s “Standing on the Moon” captures the Dead’s intricate stylistic flair and hypnotic and transporting rhythms.