Acclaimed Americana trailblazers Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country and Molly Tuttle will join forces for a special co-headline performance at Cincinnati’s Taft Theatre on September 24. Blending Donato’s electrifying sound with Tuttle’s Grammy-winning bluegrass mastery and heartfelt songwriting, the evening promises a genre-defying concert by two of music’s most dynamic live performers.
ABOUT DANIEL DONATO’S COSMIC COUNTRY
There are a lot of musical influences and sources that Daniel Donato has drawn on during his career and that inform his latest album, Horizon (Retrace Music), his second all-original album. But within those, Donato has carved out a unique and individualized spot for himself, one that speaks to the deep American music heritage that inspires him — and that he’s pushing towards the future with inspired, intentional vigor.
He calls it Cosmic Country, a moniker that’s both self-descriptive and a statement of purpose. It’s an organic rock band aesthetic with plenty of roadhouse twang; a showcase for Donato’s instrumental virtuosity and facility for melodically infectious songcraft. Bridging Nashville and the Great West, Kentucky and mid-60s northern California, tie-dye and plaid, it’s a world of his own, and a wide world of musical adventure at that.
While growing up in Nashville with his father, who turned his young son on to music of all genres, suggested the fledgling and industriously minded (even at just 14) artist start busking in Nashville’s lower Broadway area and outside concerts, for eight hours at a time on the weekends. One night, the two happened by Robert’s Western World where legendary honky-tonk local mainstay the Don Kelly Band were performing. Donato eventually became a member of the band, playing four hours a night at Robert’s (464 shows in total).
Horizons is the follow up to 2023’s Reflector, which received critical acclaim from a wide range of press, including No Depression, Glide Magazine, Magnet Magazine, and more. Donato the subject of features in Rolling Stone, UPROXX, Garden & Gun and Relix. Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country made their network television debut on CBS Saturday Morning and appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s #LateShowMeMusic online series.
The whole package of player, singer, writer and band leader was in place. Three albums in, Daniel Donato’s Cosmic Country, featuring Nathan “Sugarlegg” Aronowitz (keyboards/guitars/vocals), Will “Mustang” McGee (bass/vocals) and Will “Bronco” Clark (drums, percussion/vocals) are selling out venues throughout the country and bringing their brand of Cosmic Country to an ever growing, passionate fanbase.
ABOUT MOLLY TUTTLE
Following two GRAMMY®-winning albums with her band Golden Highway and a Best New Artist nomination, Molly Tuttle release her fifth full-length album, 2025’s So Long Little Miss Sunshine, to wide-spread critical acclaim. Recorded in Nashville with producer Jay Joyce, the LP saw Tuttle expand her sound into a vibrant mix of Americana, country, rock, and flat-picking while exploring deeply personal themes of self-acceptance and reinvention, shaped in part by her lifelong journey with alopecia areata.
The album earned two GRAMMY® nominations, including Best Americana Album, with its lead single “That’s Gonna Leave A Mark” also nominated for Best Americana Performance. The track became her biggest radio success to date, spending four weeks at #1 on Americana Radio and debuting in the Top 20 at AAA.
Tuttle’s career, which began at age fifteen, has charted a course between honoring bluegrass and stretching its boundaries. On this album she goes to a whole new place. Her stunning guitar work is more up-front than ever before. (One of the most decorated female guitarist alive, Tuttle was the first woman to win the prestigious International Bluegrass Music Award’s Guitar Player of the Year in 2017, at age twenty-four, and won again the following year, with nominations nearly every year since; she has also won Americana Music Association’s Instrumentalist of the Year award.) So Long Little Miss Sunshine also features Tuttle playing banjo, something she’s never done on one of her albums before.
A two-time GRAMMY® winner with five career nominations, Tuttle continues to push the boundaries of roots music while carving out a singular lane of her own.
