“It just kind of happened organically. I wanted a fun project to work on and it was nice because it kind of re-inspired me during the pandemic,” Molly Tuttle explains, while discussing the origins of her new record. On …but i’d rather be with you, the dynamic acoustic guitarist and singer interprets 10 songs from other artists, ranging from Harry Styles (“Sunflower, Vol. 6”) to Karen Dalton (“Something on Your Mind”), The National (“Fake Empire”), FKA Twigs (“Mirrored Heart”) and the Grateful Dead (“Standing on the Moon,” which yielded the album title). “I was feeling drained and it was hard for me to write my own songs. So coming back to these songs that I love was helpful.”
At the time, she was in the initial stages of working with producer Tony Berg on the follow-up to her acclaimed 2019 album, When You’re Ready. “We had been talking about making a record sometime this year or early next year so I had been staying with him. We were just trying to get to know each other while we did some preproduction—we’d play songs and listen to music together. I flew home to Nashville from his house in LA and then went into quarantine. A couple of weeks into it, we both felt like we should start working together and put these covers together. I sent him some demos—just me playing songs that I liked. And, when he heard them, he was like, ‘Why don’t we just make an album of these covers, quarantine style. You send me your guitar and vocal tracks, and I’ll have people that I work with play on top of them.” That list eventually included: Taylor Goldsmith, Matt Chamberlain, Patrick Warren and Ketch Secor.
In making her song selections, Tuttle decided to focus on compositions that were uncommon in acoustic picking circles. That is why the 26-year-old musician—who studied in the American Roots Music Program at the Berklee College of Music and would go on to win the IBMA Bluegrass Music Award for Guitar Player of the Year in 2017 (when she was the first women ever nominated in the category) and 2018—opted to take on The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow.”
Tuttle acknowledges, “The style of the song is so different from my own that it was a little challenging to work up. But once I realized that I wanted to learn the piano part as closely as I could on the guitar, the song opened up to me and I felt like I could put my own spin on it while still paying tribute to the original.” Not only does the song appear on …but i’d rather be with you, but Tuttle also conceived an absorbing, ruminative video in which her own performance of the tune is juxtaposed with appearances by a series of guests (including Tom Morello, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Linda Perry, Nathaniel Rateliff, Lilly Hiatt, Danny Clinch and Ali Harnell) who share their handwritten reflections on gender roles and social equity. From: https://relix.com/articles/detail/molly-tuttle-shes-a-rainbow/
