Crooked Tree

The title track of her GRAMMY-winning 2022 album, "Crooked Tree" offers one of the most generous and specific metaphors in contemporary Americana: a tree that grew bent, that doesn't conform to the straight-backed ideal of the forest, but that found its way to light nonetheless — and in its bending, became more interesting, more particular, more itself. Tuttle sings the song with evident personal investment, her voice warmer and more expansive than on some of her more technically demanding material, the performance shaped by conviction rather than display. The production is full without being busy — the acoustic ensemble playing with the kind of relaxed authority that comes from musicians who've found the song's center and are living in it. The flatpicking has a joyfulness here that goes beyond technical achievement, the instrument celebrating rather than demonstrating. Lyrically the song claims outsider status not as wound but as identity, the crooked tree as metaphor for anyone who grew sideways to the expectations of their community, their family, their tradition — and thrived anyway, found light anyway, bore fruit in their own season. It's the kind of anthem that doesn't announce itself as one, arriving instead as simple, direct, and true. A song for everyone who was told to grow differently and couldn't, and is grateful now they didn't.