Bluegrass artist Molly Tuttle taking a pop detour. Catch her new sound at The Burl

What would be the expected career move after you formed a band whose first two albums, both generationally defining statements on the genre they represented, nabbed Grammys? With your career visibility bolstered and your artistic credibility within that genre cemented, a third recording might seem the logical next step, right?

Right?

Well, that’s not how Molly Tuttle mapped things out. For her new “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” album, due for release the day after the bluegrass-and-way-more guitarist returns to Lexington for an outdoor concert this week at The Burl, an alternate course was chosen.

Having devoted the Grammy-winning albums “Crooked Tree” (2022) and “City of Gold” (2023) to the bluegrass inspirations she soaked up in her native California, Tuttle disbanded Golden Highway, the string music troupe she started in 2021 to make the records and fixed her musical scope on something, well, poppy.

In short, this is not the Molly Tuttle many fans expected to hear, yet it’s very much the one who always possessed a stylistic drive that has seldom remained settled for long.

“I became known for making bluegrass records, and that’s what I grew up playing,” Tuttle said. “But I always played other stuff, too, even when I was a kid. I always loved to drift around in other genres and experiment with different sounds. Coming out of the pandemic, though, I was feeling so nostalgic for the music I grew up with. In a way, it was that structure of ‘I know how this goes. This is in my wheelhouse. I know how to write a bluegrass song and make a bluegrass record.’ It gave me the confidence now, on this new record, to go out and make something new and experiment with all of these new songs I’ve been writing that didn’t fit onto my last two bluegrass records.”

New sound echoes earlier Tuttle’s pop influences

So what do the songs making up “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” sound like? Well, the sunny “Easy” summons a pop bounce that quickly recalls the early Buckingham-Nicks era of Fleetwood Mac, the darker and more topical “Everything Burns” tosses Tuttle’s hot-wired bluegrass guitar runs into a beat-driven frenzy and the more cinematic “Rosalee” blooms into a psychedelic Western of sorts that blends grinding fiddles with electric ambience.

All that might seem light years removed from the more contained, all-acoustic bluegrass of Tuttle’s more recent music. But the Golden Highway era represented only one chapter of a stylistically expansive career. When Tuttle last played The Burl, an October 2020 show that had to maintain social distancing restrictions due to the then-very-active COVID 19 pandemic, she was touring behind the all-covers album “...but I’d rather be with you.” Despite its bluegrass leanings, the repertoire drew on songs by The Rolling Stones, The National, Rancid and FKA twigs. The album title is drawn from a lyric to The Grateful Dead’s “Standing on the Moon.”

“The covers record was more in the vein of singer-songwriter/guitar-very-prominent music, but was not really tied to a specific genre like bluegrass.

“This new record was like that. It felt like something I just had to do. It was like I didn’t even have a choice. The songs I was writing over the last year, they just fit into this different category. When I’m making records, I can write to certain things to some extent, but at the same time I have to do what I’m inspired to do or else I’m just not going to even make music because I won’t feel the call to do it.”

New all-female band can handle both bluegrass, pop

With the new album and new musical approach comes a new band. After dissolving Golden Highway, Tuttle gathered a new, all-female ensemble that can take on both the pop demands of the “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” material as well her more bluegrass-dominate songs.

“Earlier this year, when I started planning all this out, I didn’t account for how much of a drastic change it would be when it finally happened,” Tuttle said. “It’s so easy to plan it out, but then when it actually happens, it’s like, ‘Whoa, this is so different.’ I mean, I toured with drums and electric instruments for years before the pandemic, but it’s been so long that I have to get used to that sound again.

“When I have a bluegrass band like Golden Highway, I want it to be its own special thing. With this new band, we’re still able to play the bluegrass material because we’ve got some amazing multi-instrumentalists that can also switch to bluegrass instruments and jam out to some of the songs from the last two records. But we also have the ability to get a little louder with drums and play stuff off the new record that was calling for slightly different instrumentation.”

Performing with Ringo Starr, Dave Matthews

Tuttle may be well-prepared to take on the pop world, but is pop music ready for her? Well, if the company she keeps is any indication, then the answer is definitely yes. She found herself performing in Nashville earlier this year at both the Ryman Auditorium and the Grand Ole Opry with Ringo Starr (who, admittedly, was promoting a country album, “Look Up,” that Tuttle was part of.) Then as recently as July, she was wound up onstage in Montana gigging with Dave Matthews and Lukas Nelson.

“Listening to you list all the people I’ve gotten to play with, I was like, ‘I’m not worthy.’ Even now, it’s like, ‘How did I get to play with these cool people like Dave Matthews?’ There’s kind of this imposter syndrome feeling. That’s something I’ve always tried to get around. I feel this record is the next step for me for just kind of do what I want to do.”

One senses, then, that making a record like “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” and shifting away from exclusively bluegrass territory was liberating for Tuttle.

“That kind of became the theme to some of the songs, like a through line. Even when I was making the album cover, I kind of wanted to step into my own a little bit more and really show who I am. It’s definitely something that has slowly developed for me as an artist. I’ve long grappled with ‘How do I express who I am more and more with each project and just become more confident?’ That’s something I’ve struggled with when I was young. I just didn’t feel confident in who I was.”

Owning alopecia, wig collection

The album cover art to “So Long Little Miss Sunshine” Tuttle references is a Brady Bunch-style collage of the artist donning nine different hair styles echoing an equal number of moods. The most telling is the portrait at the center – one of Tuttle without any hair at all. That’s not some AI-generated vision. Tuttle was diagnosed with alopecia, resulting in total body hair loss, as a child. She has made no secret of the condition through the years, but through the album cover photo, as well as clever references in one of the new album’s wilier tunes, “Old Me (New Wig),” it has become a more open aspect of her personal, as well as professional, profile.

“As a kid, it was mortifying to me,” she said. “Now I’ve gotten to a place where I can write a line like ‘I’m wearing a new wig to get you out of my hair.’ That set the tone for me to go, ‘Okay, I’m going to own this. I’m going to have fun with it.’

“When I was a kid, I didn’t really have anyone to look up to who would show me it would be okay. So if I can do that for someone now, that’s my ultimate goal. Even if it’s not alopecia. It can be people who look different in one way or another or just feel out of place. When I’m feeling burnt out or I’m on tour and I’ve had no sleep and I’m like ‘What am I doing with my life,’ that’s what keeps me going, just that mission of trying to bring some positivity and levity to anything people might be dealing with.”

Molly Tuttle

When: Aug. 14 at 8 p.m.

Where: The Burl (outdoor concert), 375 Thompson Rd.

Tickets: $30 through theburlky.com.