SPOTLIGHT: AJ Lee and Blue Summit Take the Long View on Career and ‘City of Glass’

EDITOR’S NOTE: AJ Lee and Blue Summit is No Depression‘s Spotlight band for July 2024. Look for more about them and their new album, City of Glass (out July 19 on Signature Sounds), all month long.

Conventional wisdom would say it’s high time for AJ Lee and Blue Summit to uproot from California’s Bay Area and make the move to Nashville. They’ve been hard at work touring and building an audience, and they’re about to release their third album, City of Glass, on Signature Sounds.

But conventional wisdom doesn’t take into account California’s rich support for roots artists through its powerhouse bluegrass association, festivals, and youth programs. It overlooks the state’s celebration of originality in its artists and the breadth of genres in its musical culture. It ignores the community of musicians, producers, and other industry folks already in place in the Golden State.

And then there’s the smell.

“Once you go on a monthlong tour and you’ve seen all these beautiful places, you come back to the Bay and it just has that smell,” says Lee from her home in Santa Cruz. “As soon as you get outside the car or the plane, it has that smell that hits you and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m so glad I’m not in Nashville.’”

Adds Jan Purat, the band’s fiddle player: “We were raised an hour away or less from the Pacific Ocean. There’s no Pacific Ocean in Nashville.”

“That smell,” as the band describes it, is a blend of ocean breeze, the area’s abundant eucalyptus trees, the snap of wet grass, and something sweet and mysterious borne on the fog.

Noticing and appreciating details like that forms the heart of the music AJ Lee and Blue Summit has made for nearly a decade now. The natural world, nuances of how people relate to each other, and little things that build up to something big show up in their songs, including on City of Glass, releasing on July 19. Their sound takes note of the bluegrass traditions in which they were steeped but steps boldly forward, incorporating the country, rock, pop, and more wafting by on that California breeze.

Honestly, they don’t need Nashville. They’re a band that’s making it on their own terms, at their own speed, and in their own place.

Great Expectations

In 2011, Mother Jones published a profile of a 13-year-old AJ Lee under the headline “Could This Kid Be the Next Alison Krauss?”.

That’s a hell of an expectation to put on a kid, but there are some ways in which the comparison was apt. Like Krauss, Lee took her first steps into music at a young age, with an inaugural performance at age 4 at an open-mic night at a local pizzeria. Also like Krauss, Lee possessed a voice that seemed far bigger than her small frame, and far wiser than her few years. And the fertile ground in which both talents took root, albeit on opposite sides of the country, was bluegrass festivals.

From left, Sullivan Tuttle, AJ Lee, Jack Tuttle, Molly Tuttle, and Michael Tuttle in a promotional photo for The Tuttles with AJ Lee

As a child at one such festival, the California Bluegrass Association’s Father’s Day Festival in Grass Valley, Lee crossed paths with music teacher Jack Tuttle and his children: Molly, Sullivan, and Michael. Within a few years they were a band, billed as The Tuttles with AJ Lee. They released two albums and played festivals and shows in California and much farther afield for a few years before going on hiatus as the band’s young members neared the end of their teens and scattered to attend college.

But the music didn’t stop. Lee formed Blue Summit in 2015, with Sullivan Tuttle on guitar among its members, and the group toured widely as they found their sound for a new phase of life. The band’s first album, 2019’s Like I Used To (ND review), showed off their bluegrass bona fides with a youthful twist, and 2021’s I’ll Come Back (ND review) pulled in sounds beyond that genre. City of Glass finds the band, now with Purat on fiddle and Scott Gates on guitar and vocals, taking in their surroundings — what they see around them but also what they see within themselves.

For the first time, there’s a rotation of lead vocals and songwriters. Most songs feature Lee’s voice, as well as her mandolin, but Tuttle steps up to the mic on “Seaside Town,” and Gates’ vintage country crooning is featured on three of the album’s songs. Riding herd for the album’s recording was Lech Wierzynski — “a homie of ours,” Lee says. The band admired Wierzynski’s independent spirit with his own group, The California Honeydrops, and treasured his experience as a vocalist, too.

“We’ve hung out with him many times, so we knew what we were going to get into with him, and he had a lot of great things to say as a vocalist,” Lee explains. “With me and Scott and Sully, he was able to coach us in a way where it was like we were speaking the same language.”

In the studio, on the road, and in all of its business dealings, the band strives to work with “people that have done what we do,” Purat says. And so they moved cautiously into signing with a record label — another first that came with City of Glass. But Northampton, Massachusetts-based Signature Sounds (which, like AJ Lee and Blue Summit, hasn’t felt the need to relocate away from its original stomping grounds) feels like a good fit so far.

Getting signed was a “bucket-list” item for the band, one of several they’ve been able to check off in the past few years. They’ve played venues and festivals they’ve always wanted to play (including the Telluride Bluegrass Festival last month), and they hired a manager, then a booking agent, then a tour manager. They’ve racked up awards, including an IBMA Momentum Award for Vocalist of the Year (2019) for Lee and top honors in the 2019 FreshGrass Awards band contest. (The awards are presented by the FreshGrass Foundation, No Depression’s nonprofit publisher.) And they’ve upgraded from a van to a small shuttle bus named Ursula. After building their career piece by piece, “we’re trying to incorporate a little bit more infrastructure in the music industry to let us keep doing what we love doing,” Lee says.

“In a way,” she adds, “it’s very validating to have been a band and to have been doing music for this long and to finally be getting our first label now because it doesn’t feel like it’s just a phase or a passing thing. We’ve actually worked really hard to get to where we are and we’re getting recognized for that, which feels really nice.”

Building a Mountain

On City of Glass’ title track, a glistening city is viewed in terms of its component parts, namely the grains of sand that make up the glass in all those tall buildings. It’s a magic trick that makes something solid feel suddenly temporary, a reminder that nothing is forever, so it’s best to focus on what truly lasts.

“Hillside” likewise takes the long view, likening a hill’s eons-long journey of breaking down and building up to a woman’s deeply ingrained and enduring power. Lee had some of the music and images in mind for years, but it took a little more living to find the song’s heart. She realized what the song was truly about after years of “being a touring musician, doing this professionally, walking along life, becoming more familiar with what it’s like to be a woman in bluegrass and just a woman in general in the world,” she reflects.

The song clicked into place when she paired the mountains she saw around her in California with that experience.

“I just remember feeling the strength in that, where you have this almost eternal-feeling natural structure that no matter what, there’s basically nothing you can do to topple over this hill that’s going to become this mountain. And I feel like that’s a really great message for women to have that confidence and encouragement to just keep being a woman, keeping being yourself, and you’re going to have all these obstacles against you, but you’re on this path that’s set for you and you go, girl, you just keep doing your thing.”

The band brings some old friends back into the circle with “I Can’t Find You at All,” a song fragment from Molly Tuttle dating back to The Tuttles. Originally envisioned as a song about a person who’s moved on, Jack, with an assist from Sullivan, got the song over the finish line by flipping the perspective to the person left behind, inspired by some personal experience.

“According to Jack, it’s about getting ghosted,” Lee explains.

“By Molly!” Purat adds, with his bandmates laughing along.

“Since it’s a song that Jack wrote technically about Molly when she moved to Boston to go to college,” Lee says, “we figured it’d be cool to have her sing on it.”

Lee and Molly Tuttle trade verses and harmonize on the choruses in the wistful song, with lyrics that zoom in on the details of a yearning heart (“your picture’s on the wall / but I can’t find you at all”) but a mournful sound that extends the sorrow to the aftermath of any kind of difficult change.

City of Glass ends with “All I Know,” a return to the appreciation of small things and holding on to what’s good while it lasts. Lee’s laidback vocals, with a gentle melody like a stream finding its way through a forest, check in with the air, with the ground, and with a belief in more than what we can see. It’s a four-minute meditation for busy people, inspired by a mushroom-induced moment in the California countryside in which Lee found herself lying on the ground and listening deeply.

“I don’t actively meditate,” Lee says, “but in that moment I was just breathing and feeling everything. So I feel like this song, hopefully when people hear it, they’ll want to take a step back too and breathe in the air.”

The Road Ahead

These days, AJ Lee and Blue Summit are on the road about two-thirds of the year. That’s a necessity to make ends meet and to keep building an audience, and it can be draining. But they’ve found a way to make it invigorating, too.

“When we’re on tour, we’re all together every day and we’re playing music every day. And I feel like even though we’re really busy, we come up with a lot of musical ideas just from playing on stage that much,” Sullivan Tuttle says.

And there are other rewards too, including more items crossed off that bucket list. A big one is coming up in just a few days, when they’ll make their debut at the Grand Ole Opry. After that, there’s room for even bigger dreams.

“We’re working really hard now because it feels we’re growing a lot, and there’s a lot of goals that we have that we’re slowly checking off as we move along here,” says Purat. “We’re lucky to be doing what we’re doing.”