Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway - City of Gold (2023) LP

Bluegrass-Americana phenom Molly Tuttle and her Golden Highway band saw their 2022 ensemble debut, Crooked Tree, take home the trophy for Best Bluegrass Album at the 65th Annual Grammy Awards. The pressure to deliver a worthy sequel has had little effect on the group. Tuttle and company have released another assured collection of songs that pair virtuosic musicianship with relatable and erudite songwriting. Despite having formed just a few years prior, Golden Highway (Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle, harmony vocals), Dominick Leslie (mandolin), Shelby Means (bass, harmony vocals), and Kyle Tuttle (banjo, harmony vocals) have matured into a picking, strumming, and fiddling tour de force, and Tuttle and co-producer/dobro specialist Jerry Douglas' live studio recording dutifully captures the band's intuitive on-stage dynamics. Looking to her native California for lyrical inspiration – much of the material was co-written with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show – Tuttle's Western-leaning bluegrass, folk, and Americana songs bear the hallmarks of traditional country music (heartbreak, salvation, etc.) without subscribing to its reductive qualities. Spirited opener "El Dorodo" spins a cautionary tale of gold lust and greed from the perspective of the last miner standing, Gold Rush Kate, while the punchy "Where Did All the Wild Things Go?" laments social and societal gentrification ("Sometimes you gotta stand out in a crowd, get loud, fly your freak flag proud") with a profusion of punk rock 'tude. Tuttle remains an astute balladeer, evidenced by the divorce-inducing road trip tale "Yosemite," a duet with Dave Matthews, the harrowing, abortion rights narrative "Goodbye Mary," and the winkingly sweet self-love closer "The First Time I Fell in Love," but City of Gold works best when all of the pistons are pumping. Eschewing the beer and whiskey-soaked ruminations of classic country for stories of greener, though no less inebriating pastures, "Down Home Dispensary" and "Alice in the Bluegrass" blaze a fiery, smoke-filled path through the genre, leaving behind the seeds for a new generation to sow.