Risk and Reward: Sierra Hull Goes Indie for ‘A Tip Toe High Wire’

It’s hard to put a label on Sierra Hull. She grew up in bluegrass, but she and her mandolin have stretched those roots far beyond any one genre. She’s found success as a solo artist, but she revels in collaborations. She emerged as a child prodigy, debuting at the Grand Ole Opry at age 10, playing Carnegie Hall when she was 12, and signing with Rounder Records at 13; but at 33 she is still breaking new ground.

be a surprise that amid the downtime of the pandemic, as her contract with Rounder ran out and she pondered her future, Hull chose freedom. With her fourth album, A Tip Toe High Wire, which came out March 7, she’s become an independent artist in every sense of the word.

Stepping out onto that particular high wire was daunting. “It’s a little scary still, and it’s a very new space to be in, and I feel like I’m learning a lot,” Hull says. “But I felt like I kind of owed it to myself to take the risk.”

Freedom and Friends

Hull has earned impressive of accolades over her career so far, with two Grammy nominations and a slew of IBMA awards, including the first IBMA Mandolin Player of the Year recognition awarded to a woman, in 2016. Her sweet voice, virtuosic mandolin playing, and insightful songwriting have made her a staple at the biggest bluegrass festivals and a go-to collaborator for her peers as well as the music’s elders.

But with all the music she’s put out onstage and on recordings, she’s taken in just as much from mentors, peers, and friends. “I’ve always continued on my own path, making my own music and touring and all that,” she says. “But I’ve been really lucky, especially over the last few years, to be able to do some things in between that, whether it be with somebody like Béla Fleck or Sturgill Simpson or Cory Wong, the Allman Betts project or whatever. I get these wildly different musical experiences that I think always … inspire you to bring what you learn from these situations back to your own music.”

Collaborating on someone else’s music allows Hull to “see it from the outside in a way that I can never see my own thing from the outside,” she explains.

When it came time for Hull to invite guests into her own music-making process for A Tip Toe High Wire, folks gladly answered the call. “Come Out of My Blues” is a co-write with frequent John Prine collaborator Pat McLaughlin, and Tim O’Brien adds harmony vocals to sweeten the song. Hull recorded Béla Fleck’s banjo for “E Tune” in a dressing room while the two were on tour together. And she had Aoife O’Donovan in mind even as she was writing the first notes of frenetic tour diary “Let’s Go.” The collaborations add energy and depth to the album, but Hull is clearly the architect, building on her bluegrass foundations and reaching new heights in her songwriting, singing, and playing.

In addition to releasing the album independently, Hull took another step into new territory by producing A Tip Toe High Wire herself, partly a personal challenge but also a product of circumstance: she recorded in pieces as time and schedules allowed over the past few years. Her longtime engineer, Shani Gandhi, was on hand to get the sound just right, and she brought her top-notch road band aboard to keep the arrangements as exciting in the studio as they are onstage.

The result, High Wire, shows off Hull’s otherworldly musical mastery, yet feels very human. Many of the songs explore deep sadness, but also point to a way out of it.

Over an irresistible groove on “Boom,” which opens the album, Hull sings:

Promises break like little figurines

We slip up and they get busted all to smithereens

Take some time to cry, but make some time to clean

And then … boom, live to love again

The optimism in that song and across A Tip Toe High Wire comes from a genuine place and is offered gently. It’s in Hull’s nature to keep on the sunny side, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t experienced shadows.

“I’m a fairly optimistic person in general,” she says, “but I think as somebody that is a musician and an artist, we feel things really deeply. So I’ve spent a lot of my life with those highs feeling really high, and the lows can feel really low. And I feel like I’m in a place, especially now in my 30s, which I guess age brings, where I feel less of both of those things. It feels like those emotions have become a bit more balanced, so that even on the hardest day, it’s not going to destroy me.”

On the harder days, creating music is often what helps push Hull through. But for A Tip Toe High Wire, she found inspiration from both the good days and bad days, resulting in an album with a wide range of topics and textures.

Hull applies deep empathy outside herself here, too. In particular, she gives elder members of her family attention on A Tip Toe High Wire. On “Spitfire,” which contains the lyric that gives the album its title, she tells the story of her Granny, who passed away in 2023 after a long life marked by tragedies. Despite all she went through, including becoming a widow before age 18, Hull’s grandmother built up a toughness that allowed love to shine through. But Hull could tell, and doesn’t sugarcoat, that the dark times took their toll:

She’s a spitfire

Tougher than thorns on a brier

And you really can’t blame her

If she’s easy to anger

She’s a spitfire

“I probably could have written another 15 or 20 verses about what this woman went through, whether it was just life tragedies, hardships, or health things,” Hull says. “But somehow through all of that, she still got up every morning and faced the day. And I think about how that shapes a person and how much resilience that somebody like that has. I mean, we all know somebody like that.”

Another elder provided the inspiration for the galloping, instrumental “Lord, That’s a Long Way.” The title is a playful tribute to how the grandmother of Hull’s husband, multi-instrumentalist Justin Moses, would respond whenever she learned that Moses and Hull had driven three hours from Nashville to visit her East Tennessee home. And the album ends with “Haven Hill,” named for the place where Moses’ other grandmother is buried. The song, sweet and sunny and probably the loveliest spot on the album, is a call to savor both the laughter and the tears that life serves up along the journey “from home to Haven Hill.” “Savor the midnights,” Hull urges in the song, “we’re all bound for starlight.”

A New Kind of Outlaw

This summer, Hull is bound for the West Coast leg of the Outlaw Music Festival Tour, sharing a bill with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Billy Strings. She may not look the part of an outlaw, but her adventurous musical spirit makes it a rare label that fits.

Despite her many forays into other genres, Hull says bluegrass will always be her home. The music inspired her to pick up an instrument (mandolin first, around age 8, then guitar a year later because she was crazy about bluegrass guitarist Tony Rice), but the community around it is what made her keep playing and keep challenging herself.

“It’s something that I will inevitably return to again and again and again throughout my career, whether it’s collaborations with other people or music of my own that I’m making,” Hull says. “There’s no way that that’s not going to be also interwoven into the other things that I do. At the end of the day, I’m just taking that with me and changing the scenery a little bit with what’s around me more than I am changing myself.”