As all the “Best of 2024” lists are making the rounds, on January 4, Becky Buller released what could be the ideal theme song for anyone looking forward toward 2025. On the heels of her Jubilee song cycle, in which Buller opened up with her personal struggles with depression, she offers up an uplifting antidote. Buller’s new single “Reach,” which she discovered from New Grass Revival was originally recorded by Orleans. This release is her third single for an album of covers projected for September 2025, following “Millworker” and “Wall Around Your Heart” (with Jim Lauderdale).
Backing Buller on the single are her fellow members of the First Ladies of Bluegrass, all the first females to win the International Bluegrass Music Association’s award in their particular categories: Molly Tuttle for guitar, Sierra Hull for mandolin, Missy Raines for bass and Alison Brown banjo, joining Buller who won for both fiddle and female vocalist of the year in 2016. The five have performed together on occasion and have backed one another on personal projects, like this one and Missy Raines’ song “Swept Away,” the 2018 IBMA Recorded Event of the Year, but have not released a recording together as the First Ladies of Bluegrass.
“Reach” not only highlights Buller’s vocals, with an upbeat melody that has her reaching for the sweet notes at the high end of her register, but also showcases the harmonies and virtuosity of the women playing with her. Buller opens with the fiddle, joined by Brown on banjo, as she sings of the tensions between the past and future:
Sometimes I stop and wonder
Why can’t I let myself enjoy
The space I’m in,
all the wonderful places I’ve been?
The harmony vocals by Hull and Tuttle on the chorus resume right on cue in the second verse as Buller sings of the need for a vision and a friend. The solo breaks on guitar and mandolin punctuating the song undergird the song’s message and almost seem to bring the song to an end before the chorus resumes at a faster tempo, with the voices weaving together before seeming to resolve on a chord of gospel harmony. Then the instruments resume and skitter off to the song’s end, leaving listeners to ponder the enticing possibility that “[if you] reach a little bit higher…you’ll never grow old.”
Listen here.
