ALBUM REVIEW: Molly Tuttle Keeps Moving on ‘City of Gold’

On City of Gold, the second album from Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway, wanderlust is a central theme, as are its consequences, both positive and negative. Tuttle’s stellar band, Golden Highway (comprised of fiddler Bronwyn Keith-Hynes, mandolinist Dominick Leslie, banjoist Kyle Tuttle, and bassist Shelby Means), backs her throughout City of Gold, which follows just 15 months after their collective debut, Crooked Tree (ND review). In addition, Tuttle gets a big assist from Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, who co-wrote most of the album’s songs.

On lead single “El Dorado,” Tuttle details the characters who followed the gold rush “from Boulder down to Haines” and eventually to the song’s setting of Coloma. Here not only is the miners’ lust for gold on display, but also the gold lust of those who mine not the ground but the miners themselves, from a saloon/brothel owner who “keeps the red light burning bright” to a fortune teller who will tell you “everything but where to find the gold” to a huckster who will “fool you with a fountain pen.”

For “Yosemite,” Tuttle brings in Dave Matthews for a duet about a couple whose marriage is on the rocks. They decide the solution is a long road trip to a national park because “maybe the road will fix everything.” If you’ve ever been stuck in a car for days with someone you’ve discovered you don’t like all that much, you can figure out how their trip ends, with Tuttle noting that “sometimes the road is the best remedy / for two broken hearts that need setting free.”

Roots music’s favorite symbol wanderlust on the road, the train, features on “San Joaquin,” where the protagonist is not just riding the train, but smuggling a suitcase full of marijuana. There’s a little bit of the paranoia of Arlo Guthrie’s “Los Angeles” here, but mostly it’s just a fun, fast bluegrass romp featuring dobro from the album’s co-producer, Jerry Douglas.

“Alice in the Bluegrass” retells the story of one of literature’s most famous wanderers, Lewis Carroll’s protagonist from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with a country bent. It’s a song full of snapping turtles, glowworms on Caterpillar tractors and, of course, substances that make you smaller and larger (moonshine and cornbread in this case). It’s a silly but fun song that kicks off Side B of the album well.

Ultimately, City of Gold is a very different album than Crooked Tree — in some ways tighter and in others more free flowing. In both cases it’s an album that might just tap into your own wanderlust, or at least provide a little bit of respite from the drudgery of modern life. Sometimes that’s enough.

Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway’s City of Gold is out July 21 on Nonesuch Records.