Though among the most masterful of all popular musicians, bluegrass artists have had difficulty crossing over to a larger audience. Twenty years after Alison Krauss and her angelic voice broke through the pickin' and grinnin' ceiling with her cover of "Baby, Now That I've Found You," the massively talented Molly Tuttle is poised to do the same. After an evolution that included the EP, Rise, and pair of LPs—When You're Ready and …but i'd rather be with you (the latter serving notice of her ambitions with covers of FKA Twigs, Harry Styles and The Rolling Stones), Tuttle has made her momentous Nonesuch label debut with Crooked Tree. Tuttle aims for a sweet spot that successfully crosses bluegrass instrumental prowess with pop music appeal; she nails it from the first note. This once-in-a-generation talent and repeat winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award is also a gifted singer and, as heard here, an increasingly accomplished songwriter. Recorded at Ocean Way Studio B in Nashville, Crooked Tree was produced by dobro player Jerry Douglas—once Krauss' producer of choice—who also adds his instrumental voice throughout. Other names on the well-chosen guest list include Margo Price, Viktor Krauss, and Gillian Welch. As a songwriter, Tuttle's focuses on the wonders of the natural environment and its organic scale of justice. In the title track, perfect trees come under the ax which "turned them into toothpicks and twenty dollar bills," but the crooked trees which "won't fit into the mill machine" are left "to grow wild and free." Tuttle rolls through a North American travelog in "Big Backyard" (which features Old Crow Medicine Show): "Now my backyard is a redwood forest/ And yours is a rocky shore in New England/ Her backyard is the streets of New York/ And his is the hum of the LA freeway." The banjo-dobro-fiddle number "Flatland Girl," a duet with Price, has the feel of a folk music classic. She's also become an artful storyteller whether treading the Copperhead Road in "Dooley's Farm" the oft-told tale of a pot farmer who "Got his schoolin' out in Vietnam" and who is eventually caught, but whose granddaughter carries on "growing green," or sharing the tale of "a woman who can’t trust a man in need" in the frightening "The River Knows." An eloquent album by a flourishing virtuoso. © Robert Baird/Qobuz