When Molly Tuttle finishes “Everything Burns” — the song she’s been using to open her current The Highway Knows tour — she knows she can breathe.

“It’s honestly terrifying for me because it starts with this fast guitar riff, which is the hardest guitar part I play on the new record,” she said. “I love it because it’s this big guitar moment to kick things off, and it’s the first song on the record, and it feels like a really fun, dramatic start because I’m opening the song with this fast, descending guitar cross-picking riff. And then it goes into this longer solo.

“But at the same time, every time before we go on stage, my band has been laughing at me because I’ll be like screaming. I’m like, ‘Ahh! I don’t want to do it. I’m scared.’ Because it’s the most challenging guitar part, especially to just open with it cold. I get so freaked out about it.”

After two Grammy-winning records in a row — 2022’s “Crooked Tree” and 2023’s “City of Gold,” both tabbed as Best Bluegrass Album — Tuttle is stretching her boundaries with her latest album, “So Long Little Miss Sunshine,” which dropped on Aug. 15.

The bluegrass chops are still there, but she’s leaning a little more pop on the new album, which includes a cover of Icona Pop and Charli xcx’s “I Love It.”

“It does feel like a total brand new chapter for me, which is really exciting,” she said. “And it’s kind of nerve wracking, but also just really gives me a lot of energy to be embarking down a new path and trying new things. Yeah, it’s been really fun.”

Tuttle’s tour hits Pittsburgh on Sept. 13 with a show at Carnegie of Homestead Music Hall, where she’ll be joined by Town Mountain and Cecilia Castleman. Her April 2024 show at Jergel’s in Warrendale still stands out 16 months later.

“We had the best time at Jergel’s. So many people wore rabbit ears to that show. We were on our Down the Rabbit Hole tour, and we were covering ‘White Rabbit’ a lot and someone I think in the crowd made like 30 light-up bunny ears for people to wear and they were all wearing them. So I know you Pittsburgh people like to dress up. So what are you going to dress up as this time around?” she said with a laugh. “I’m curious to see.”

In a Zoom call from Nashville, Tuttle spoke with TribLive about straddling the bluegrass and pop worlds, her new band and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

How’s the response been to the new songs on the tour so far?

It’s been really good. The shows have been super fun. We’ve been playing maybe a little over half the new record and then interspersing it with the older songs as well. So it’s been fun debuting a bunch of the new songs, but also kind of reworking some of the songs off my last couple of records with the new band. Then we do a little break in the middle and gather around one mic to do kind of a bluegrass portion of the set. It just feels like the show is really fun and dynamic, and it’s been great playing the new songs.

Was there any apprehension about going in this direction? I know you moved a little bit more pop and away from the bluegrass a little bit.

Yeah, it’s been kind of a record that I’ve wanted to make for maybe five years now, four years, five years. I’ve been talking to Jay (Joyce) about this, so it felt like a long time coming. My last two records obviously were more in the bluegrass realm, “City of Gold” and “Crooked Tree,” but then before that I’d been doing a more singer-songwriter, indie folk Americana-type record like this, so it didn’t feel like something brand new.

Maybe I’m pushing it a little farther than I had been before. I think bluegrass is one of those genres where people who listen to exclusively bluegrass, they do get a little upset when their artists they listen to are taking another twist and turn, but at the same time so many of my favorite bluegrass artists are always mixing it up, playing different genres, people like Bela Fleck and Sam Bush and even Alison Krauss, she’ll do a solo record and then come back and do a bluegrass record.

So I don’t feel like I’m the only one who’s ever done this before. (laughs) But, yeah, that’s been kind of interesting just feeling that from some of the bluegrass fans, but then having people still come out to a show and being like, ‘Oh, well, I actually really enjoyed the show and you’re still playing a lot of bluegrass and I like the new songs too.’ So I’m chipping away at it. I’m like, maybe I’ll change some of your minds and open you up to this new style. (laughs)

Will there be even more like pushing it? Are we going to see a rap album? Are we going to see hard rock/alternative, anything like that?

I don’t know about that. (laughs) No, I’ve been kind of writing songs for my next record and I feel like what I’d like to do is even combine. I felt like with my last three records, I made these two bluegrass records and every time I’d write a bluegrass song, I put it in my bluegrass pile. If I wrote a song outside that world, I’d put it in a different pile. I’d like to make a record that’s all of that, everything I’ve done, combined into one and see if I can make it all fit together somehow and weave in some, maybe write a total bluegrass song and put it on the same record as a song that could have been on this last record. I think that would be really fun to play around with.

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What is it about this new group of musicians that you’re playing with that makes them great?

I think it’s a really versatile group. The first person I reached out to about this project was the bassist, Vanessa McGowan. She plays all different styles of music. She does upright and electric bass, and she sings as well. I’ve known her for a long time. Everyone in the group, they’ve all lived in Nashville for a while, and I’ve known them through the years. So she kind of helped me put together the rest of the band. It ended up being an all-female band, which was not really intentional. It just sort of happened that way, and we’re like, great, OK, we’ll take it.

But then I asked Megan Jane, who’s a drummer who I’ve actually toured with. I toured with her back in 2021, just coming out of the pandemic. We were starting to do little shows here and there, and she played with me, and we did some live streams during the pandemic when we couldn’t really tour. So I played with her a bunch. And she is a great drummer, and when we do the more acoustic stuff, she’ll play the washboard. She even has made this little drum out of an old suitcase, and it’s like a suitcase kick drum. She hasn’t played that yet, but we’re all like, we need to find a good suitcase song for you, because it’s really cool. (laughs)

And then the other two musicians are Ellen Angelico, who is someone I’ve known for a long time. She used to work at this guitar store called Fanny’s House of Music that I love. It’s a wonderful guitar store, and she plays all sorts of instruments. She plays banjo, guitar, pedal steel, dobro, she’s been playing dobro on a lot of the bluegrass songs. She’s gonna play some banjo, and then she started playing pedal steel on this last run we went on, as well as acoustic and electric guitar. So she’s just very versatile and can kind of play everything that I need.

And then the other musician is similarly Mary Meyer, who actually grew up in a bluegrass family band. I first heard of her when she was playing mandolin in this band, Sister Sadie. That’s one of my favorite bluegrass bands, they’re great. But I didn’t know she could play all these other instruments, too. She plays mandolin, she also plays fiddle and keys with me, and then she can also play banjo and guitar, and so many other stuff. At this point, we’re just like, how much space do we have on the bus to bring enough instruments? (laughs) That’s our only limitation now is that, and then how many times per set can you be switching instruments without kind of delaying the next song from happening. So far she’s only playing three instruments, but she’s also a great singer and just really fun. She’s so great at we can trade back and forth on solos on the bluegrass songs, but she can also play keys. And there’s certain songs where she’s playing multiple instruments during one song, which is fun.

If you look at the album overall, what are the themes that stick out to you?

I think some of the themes of the album are becoming more confident in yourself. There’s some songs that are a coming-of-age story. Songs like “Old Me, New Wig” are really about just shedding the past and letting go of insecurities and becoming unafraid to be who you are. And then I’d say another theme on the record is travel and exploring the world, kind of self-exploration, but also just exploring the world around us. There’s a bunch of travel songs on the record — I travel constantly. I love seeing new places and exploring new places. But I’d say those are some of the themes. And for the album title, I went with “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” just because I felt like it summed up one of the messages on the album, which is just learning to be who you are and be unapologetic. I’m a recovering people pleaser, so that was kind of why I chose the album title. (laughs)

The album closes with “Story of My So-Called Life,” so was it meaningful to look back and take stock of where you’ve been?

Yeah, definitely. That track touched on a lot of experiences that I’ve had that I wanted to write about in songs before, and it was going through all these pivotal moments of my life that led me to where I am now. And it ended up, like we recorded it, and then when Jay Joyce, who produced the record sent me the track listing, he had put it in an order that he thought worked. And he put that song last. And I really liked that because on my last two records, “Crooked Tree” and “City of Gold,” I’d had a similarly kind of autobiographical song as the last track on the record. So now it’s kind of a theme for me, three of my records end with that. I think it’s fun, because with that track, it’s taking stock of where I am now, but also looking towards what’s next. And I like that it has the lyric, “let’s start from the beginning,” but it’s the last track on the record. So it’s kind of subtly telling people to play the album again, listen on repeat. (laughs)

So you’ve looked at the past and then you can say, this is where I want to go, you can see what the future holds a little bit?

Yeah, the last verse on it is talking about staring at an empty page, like, I’m not sure what I’m going to write next in the story.

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