On the heels of two Grammy-winning albums in succession, with her band Golden Highway—2022’s Crooked Tree and 2023’s City of Gold—plus a nomination for Best New Artist, Molly Tuttle returns with a solo album that’s her most dazzling to date: So Long Little Miss Sunshine. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce, the fifth full album from the California-born, Nashville-based singer, songwriter, and virtuoso guitarist features twelve new songs—eleven originals and one highly unexpected cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.” Tuttle’s career, which began at age fifteen, has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. On this album—a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad—she goes to a whole new place.
Tuttle also conceived the artwork for So Long Little Miss Sunshine, which features multiple Mollys, each wearing a different wig except for one with nothing on her head at all. She acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation. One album track, “Old Me (New Wig),” is “about leaving all these things behind that don’t serve you anymore,” she says. “Parts of yourself that really aren’t in your best interest, like low self-esteem, anxieties, and not feeling confident. Learning to own these different aspects of my personality but not letting them control me is another theme of the record that inspired the album title and the cover art... I like singing this song because there are days when I still have to tell myself to leave that stuff behind.”
Looking back on her own career, Tuttle admits that she also has pursued what interests her: “It has never been a cookie-cutter thing where I’m just going down a straight road. I always had this crooked path.”
Joshua Ray Walker
Like his June release, Tropicana, Walker wrote Stuff during intensive chemo treatment for stage 3B colon cancer. For him, the albums constitute two sides of the proverbial coin: hospitals are innately devoid of creativity, utilitarian and harsh by their very nature, and Walker found himself oscillating between a gripping need to escape — say to a beach in Tropicana — and to contemplate his own legacy and the Stuff in his life. When he was briefly misdiagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which was later updated to a clean scan, Walker started to push himself creatively, resolving to release three albums (of which Stuff is the second) in whatever time he had left.
Reckoning with cancer treatment and his own mortality, Walker grieved his creative life that could potentially be cut short. Much like the items abandoned at an estate sale, he knew he too had more worth. “Both my grandparents found value in things that had life left in them,” Walker says. “At the time of writing these songs, I was really hoping that I had a second shot, some more life left in me, and I think that I projected that on a lot of these characters.”
Walker hopes that by relating to these inanimate characters, listeners will learn to better connect to living ones, too. “It's probably lofty to think that an album about bowling balls and Barbie dolls is going to make people think about their relationship with their neighbors or community,” he says. “But maybe subconsciously, if people can connect with these things that aren't even people, it'll make them a little better at connecting with people.”
Cecilia Castleman
Signed to Glassnote Records, Castleman is an exceptionally talented singer-songwriter who continues to captivate audiences with her introspective songwriting and mesmerizing performances. Her songs have an instantly classic sound and convey an emotional depth well beyond her years! Castleman has opened up shows for Sheryl Crow, Hozier, Inhaler, Melissa Etheridge, Marcus King and Patrick Droney. Castleman’s voice can be heard in the film Lilly, the documentary Every Body, HBO Max Promos, the film Princess Switch 3 and in TV shows such as Sullivan’s Crossing, Call Me Kat, Cold Justice, Siesta Key and FBoy Island.
As she continues to carve her path in the music world, Cecilia Castleman remains a beacon of authenticity, with each song serving as a heartfelt letter to herself and her listeners alike.