Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway live at the Fillmore in Silver Spring, MD review

Molly Tuttle has been on the road a lot in 2023 and 2024 and as her “Down the Rabbit Hole” tour is winding down, she’s ready to try out some new things. First off, she donned a new wig for her show at the Fillmore in Silver Spring, MD on Saturday night. A long black number that she said had been in her closet for a few months awaiting its debut.

Then there was a new guitar – a Martin acoustic she used when she gave the rest of her Golden Highway bandmates a short break and performed “Take the Journey” all by her lonesome. She even had a new mandolin player, though that change was temporary. Regular Golden Highway mandolinist Dominick Leslie is on paternity leave, so Belmont-trained player Casey Campbell is filling the role of super-sub.

There was one more subtle change in Golden Highway’s show before a thousand happy fans on Saturday. Tuttle has always been a very gracious bandleader. At times in the past, it has seemed that she almost goes out of her way to highlight the other members of Gloden Highway. There’s a good reason for that.

Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway produced a glorious night of music

The other members of the band – Shelby Means (bass), Bronwyn Keith-Hynes (fiddle), the surprisingly unrelated Kyle Tuttle (banjo), and either Campbell or Leslie, are all elite players. Tuttle herself has been honored with seven nominations and two wins as the IBMA Guitar Player of the Year, but often in the past, she took a step back during performances to showcase the rest of the band.

She continues to give her bandmates plenty of room to shine, but on Saturday, Tuttle claimed the spotlight more than she has in previous shows. From her sparkly mini-dress to that gorgeous “Take the Journey” solo and several other dynamite guitar solos scattered throughout, Molly Tuttle, at 31, seems to be an artist who is growing increasingly comfortable in her role as one of America’s finest musicians regardless of genre.

Almost half the setlist on Saturday came from Golden Highway’s Grammy-winning 2023 City of Gold album. That included an early run of songs – “Down Home Dispensary,” “Yosemite,” (with Kyle filling in for Dave Matthews, who sang the duet on the album), and the rip-roaring “El Dorado,” a blistering history lesson of the American gold rush as evocative as any m movie on the same subject.

Then, they entered what Molly referred to as the “spooky” part of the set. She switched to electric guitar for a harrowing “The River Knows,” followed by “Stranger Things,” and finally the ultra-trippy “Alice in the Bluegrass.”

She also sprinkled in several intriguing covers, beginning early on with a sprightly take on the Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow,” and pulling off a popular sing-along version of John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” toward the end. In between, she announced that we had reached the part of the concert where “we take a very popular song from the last few years and bluegrassify it,” before launching into Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U.”

Golden Highway wrapped up the main set with a glorious four-song run beginning with a raucous “Where Did All the Wild Things Go?”  which let the most-overlooked band member, bassist Shelby Means, to solo and sing. An instrumental which allowed everyone to show off for a while led into the epic “Dooley’s Farm,” Molly’s version of Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road.”

In what has become a high point of every Golden Highway show, Molly then talked about that new wig and her struggles growing up with alopecia which left her bald and caused a great deal of anxiety for her throughout her adolescence and early adulthood. She pulled off that long black wig and sang one of her signature songs, “Crooked Tree,” all about seeing your differences as your true strength. The crowd responded with nearly five minutes of applause. The ultra-fun homage to weed, “San Joaquin” closed out the main set.

Golden Highway returned for a two-song encore joined by the opening act, Two Runner. Two Runner, a folk/bluegrass duo comprised of guitarist/banjoist Paige Anderson and fiddler Emilie Rose, began the evening with an upbeat thirty-minute set featuring a lot of boot stompers. They have joined up for the final leg of the tour.

Anderson and Tuttle have been friends since they were about ten years old, running into each other and playing together at folk festivals around their northern California hometowns. Tuttle had Anderson take the vocals on the first encore number, a cover of Richard Thompson’s acoustic gem “1952 Vincent Black Lightning."

Then Tuttle, surrounded by both Golden Highway and Two Runner, closed the night with the inclusive “Big Backyard.”

There are just a handful of dates left on the “Down the Rabbit Hole” tour. The band heads up into the northeast for several shows in New York and New England before taking some well-deserved time off. Tuttle has a few shows in California in December, including a benefit at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Growing up in that area, she said it had always been a dream to play the Fillmore. But fans in the Washington, DC, area got the privilege of seeing Golden Highway’s first show at a Fillmore. That San Fran show will be her second.

Golden Highway is scheduled to hit the road again next Spring.

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