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Molly Tuttle Announces New Jay Joyce Produced Album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, for August with First Single 'That's Gonna Leave a Mark'

June 3, 2025 2:59 pm GMT

Following back-to-back Grammy-winning albums with her band Golden Highway, along with a Best New Artist nomination, Molly Tuttle goes it alone as she announces her new solo album, So Long Little Miss Sunshine, for 15 August via Nonesuch Records.

Recorded in Nashville with pop country producer Jay Joyce - best known for his work with Eric Church, Orville Peck, Miranda Lambert and Lainey Wilson among others - the fifth full album from the singer, songwriter and virtuoso guitarist signposts a sonic rerouting from her recent work into a more alt-pop leaning sound and features twelve new songs; eleven originals and a cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s ‘I Love It’.

She gives us the first taste of So Long Little Miss Sunshine with the album’s first single, 'That's Gonna Leave a Mark,' which she co-wrote with Kevin Griffin (Better Than Ezra). It's an effortlessly cool blast of breezy, soft pop-tinged country-folk more reminiscent of recent releases by Haim or Kacey Musgraves and if the rest of the album is anything like this it Molly Tuttle will be the soundtrack of our Summer in 2025.

“I’ve been wanting to make this record for such a long time," Tuttle says about the song. "Part of me was scared to do such a big departure, and that went into the album title.”

“‘You know what? I’m just not going to care what people think,'" she eventually decided. "I’m going to do what I want.’”

"I wrote ‘That’s Gonna Leave a Mark’ with my friend Kevin Griffin," she says about the album's first single. "He has such a brilliant pop sensibility. We reworked it a little bit last year. It’s fun, sort of sassy, and that guitar part is one of my favorites that I play on the record.”

Tuttle and her new live band kick off the seventy-eight date US summer-fall ‘The Highway Knows’ tour on June 6 with a show in Vail, Colorado. The dates include both festival and headline shows and conclude on December 13 at The Fillmore in San Francisco.

Tuttle’s career has charted a course between honouring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. One of the most decorated female guitarists alive, she was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.

On her new album - a hybrid of pop, country, rock, and flat-picking, plus one murder ballad - Tuttle goes to a whole new place. Her virtuoso guitar work takes centre stage on this album more than ever, and for the first time, she introduces her banjo playing into two of her recordings.

“I like to be a bit of a chameleon with my music. Keep people guessing and keep it full of surprises,” she says.

So Long Little Miss Sunshine was recorded with drummer/percussionists Jay Bellerose and Fred Eltringham, bassist Byron House, and Joyce on multiple instruments. Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show) also plays banjo, fiddle, and harmonica, as well as singing harmony; much of the LP was co-written with Secor, who is also Tuttle’s partner. “We spend so much time together, we live together, and anytime I have a song idea, or he has one, it’s just so easy to transition from whatever we’re doing into writing a song.”

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. Tuttle has been bald since she was three years old due to the autoimmune condition alopecia areata; she acts as a spokesperson for the National Alopecia Areata Foundation.