One of the brightest new names in bluegrass is coming to The Burl with a new album

How many times during the past eight months have you turned to something familiar as a source of comfort?

Perhaps it was a favorite movie, a cherished book from your youth, a TV show you had already seen dozens of times.

For Molly Tuttle, the COVID-19 pandemic sent her back to the songs she grew up with – a few of which might surprise you. As one of the brightest new names in bluegrass to emerge in recent years (she’s the first female recipient of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award), Tuttle reacquainted herself last spring with long-loved songs by the Grateful Dead, Rancid, FKA Twiggs, Cat Stevens and more – songs that had been politely pushed aside as she developed a career focused on her own sound and compositions.

She then cut selections from the revisited repertoire in quarantine with help from producer Tony Berg along with some high profile overdubbed help by the like of Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor. Music files were sent back and forth online, resulting on album she never planned on making – at least, not at this young stage of her career, titled “… but i’d rather be with you.”

“I hadn’t thought about doing a covers record,” said Tuttle, who will be at the Burl Saturday for a socially distant concert. “I was focusing on doing more originals… basically, a continuation of my last record (2019’s “When You’re Ready”), which was all original songs. But with everything happening this year, I really wanted to have a project to work on and have something to put out there because I think music right now is so important for people. It was also helpful for me to go back to these songs that have inspired me a lot through my life, especially when I was feeling a little drained.

“These songs really helped break me out of my quarantine funk and realize just how much I love music, about how important it’s been to me and to see how much joy these songs brought me in my life. Then I was thinking about the world at large, hoping that I could do that for someone else with my music. It made me realize what is important to me about playing music. In the past year, I’ve been so busy touring that sometimes I would lose sight of why I started playing music in the first place. Going back to these songs helped me connect to that.”

The sentiments behind making “… but i’d rather be with you” are perhaps best expressed by Tuttle’s lovely reading of “Standing on the Moon.” The song was one of the final compositions Jerry Garcia recorded with the Grateful Dead, a loving but bittersweet glimpse of humanity when the world could be viewed from a distance. Tuttle’s album takes its title from the song’s concluding verse: “Standing on the moon, with nothing left to do. A lovely view of heaven, but I’d rather be with you.”

“That song has been meaningful to me for years,” Tuttle said. “It reminds me of where I grew up in Palo Alto. It reminds me of San Francisco and just really makes me homesick now that I live Nashville, given how the song is about being far away and looking at the world as a whole.

“To me, this year is the first time in a lot of our lives where we realize, ‘Oh, we’re all going through this thing together, with the whole planet, right now.’ That’s why the song took on extra meaning this year as I began to zoom out and think of humanity as a whole. There was also the feeling of being far away from where I grew up, far away from loved ones because it’s so much harder now to travel home and see my family this year. So this song was an important one to put on the record.”

The sense of isolation at the heart of “Standing on the Moon” is mirrored in the way Tuttle recorded “… but i’d rather be with you.” For the better part of her musical upbringing she has been surrounded by supporters, whether it was the mentoring tutelage of her musician father as she grew up in an expansive San Francisco Bay Area string music scene, the instruction on music theory she absorbed at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston and applied to communicating with other players or the band camaraderie she enjoyed more recently in Nashville. While sessions for her new album obviously involved others, the quarantined nature of recording meant recording alone with contributions being submitted remotely.

A lovely way of making music, but Tuttle would have rather been with her musical pals in the same room.

“The experience was definitely interesting. I think in certain ways it helped me go my own way more with my own arrangements since I was all alone and recording in my house. I didn’t have anyone listening to what I was doing. Sometimes I feel self-conscious in the studio. When people are in the control room, I might not take as many risks, whereas on my own, it was just me hearing what I was doing. So I really took my time with the songs and experimented a little more than I do normally in the studio. I think that really helped me develop my voice and guitar playing on this album.

“That said, I did miss playing with people in a room. There is no substitute for just playing with other people in groups. I’m really glad I did it this way, though. It’s just that parts of it that were harder, like the communication part. I’m so used to having instant, in-the-moment feedback when you play a song for a producer.

“So after we recorded, I talked with Tony and was like, ‘This was fun. I learned a lot. But I want to make a record in the studio next time. I want people around.”

Molly Tuttle

When: 7 p.m. November 21

Where: The Burl, 375 Thompson Rd.

Tickets: $90 for table seating of six; theburlky.com/shows

Opening act: Rachel Baiman