And if you go chasing rabbits
And you know you’re going to fall
Tell ’em a hookah-smoking caterpillar
Has given you the call

Call Alice
When she was just small…

So before June of this year, I barely even knew the name Molly Tuttle. Which in retrospect makes me feel really freakin’ stupid.

I’ve been a longtime lover of bluegrass, Americana, folk, string band, progressive acoustic, and whatever else you want to call this glorious musical universe. Nickel Creek, Alison Krauss & Union Station, Dan Tyminski, Sierra Hull, Billy Strings, Béla Fleck, Old Crow Medicine Show, Greensky Bluegrass, on and on and etc. and such as.

So you would think that a Berklee graduate, winner of two consecutive Grammys for Best Bluegrass Album, and the first woman ever to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year award — twice, I might add — should have registered somewhere on my musical radar.

Whoosh. Right over my head. Because apparently I’m a dingbat.

Well, thank the Gods for YouTube, because one evening in early June, our benevolent Algorithm Overlords decided I needed to see Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway performing their cover of Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic classic White Rabbit.

And Hokeyfolk everywhere, my musical world hasn’t been quite the same since.

By July I’d purchased and practically worn out Crooked Tree, City of Gold, the Into the Wild EP, and Molly’s 2025 solo album So Long Little Miss Sunshine. By August, Boots and I drove twelve hours from Fort Lauderdale to Birmingham, Alabama, to see Molly open for Marty Stuart on the Cosmic Twang tour.

(And just between you and me, Molly absolutely stole the show. Absolutely no disrespect to Marty, who’s a legend in his own right.)

So yeah. You could say I’m a fan.

But let’s get back to White Rabbit, originally released as a single in 2023 before finding its way onto Golden Highway’s 2024 EP Into the Wild.

Molly is a self-professed Alice in Wonderland fangirl, and her interpretation of Grace Slick’s 1967 psychedelic masterpiece is nothing short of magical. Alongside Golden Highway bandmates Bronwyn Keith-Hynes on fiddle, Dominick Leslie on mandolin, Kyle Tuttle on banjo, and Shelby Means on bass, she transforms the song into a delightfully trippy bluegrass fever dream.

And holy moley macarole, does it work.

The entire arrangement introduces a playful menace to an already unsettling tune, filtering Jefferson Airplane’s hallucinogenic original through a joyfully expressive bluegrass patina. Shelby’s anchoring bassline propels everything forward. The tastefully applied effects on Molly’s vocals lend an almost ghostly quality to her delivery. Bronwyn’s buttkickingly haunting fiddle work is simply magnificent.

Meanwhile, the mandolin and banjo weave dreamy layers of otherworldliness throughout the arrangement, each instrument contributing to something that feels simultaneously familiar and wonderfully unhinged.

It’s Alice in Wonderland by way of Appalachia, with just enough psychedelic lunacy to make you wonder what somebody slipped into the sweet tea.

But it’s the outro where this thing really shines.

Just when you think the song has revealed all its tricks, the tempo ramps up, the band kicks its shoes off, and the whole affair goes careening straight down the bluegrass well. Fiddle, banjo, mandolin, guitar, bass, the entire band gets in on the action, transforming the original’s familiar psychedelic climax into an exhilarating celebration of acoustic virtuosity.

And I swear, I cannot listen to this without grinning like an idiot. It’s playful, sinister, breathtakingly performed, and just so much spooky fun. You know, exactly like Halloween is supposed to be?

So while today’s Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs selection isn’t exactly about ghosts and goblins, a hallucinogenic journey through a world of talking caterpillars, mysterious potions, and murderous monarchs certainly qualifies as some wonderfully weird Halloween-adjacent entertainment.

Besides, after this morning’s excursion into the existential agony of weeping angels, I think we’ve earned ourselves a little psychedelic bluegrass lunacy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a rabbit to follow. Hoping he leads me to more amazing new music.

When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
And the White Knight is talking backwards
And the Red Queen’s off with her head
Remember what the dormouse said
Feed your head
Feed your head…