Grace Potter

Back in summer 2021, Grace Potter tookoff on a solo cross-country road trip that would soon bring a life-savingreconnection with her most unbridled self. Heading out on Route 66 from herhome in Topanga Canyon, the Vermont-born artist spent the coming weeks crashingin roadside motels and taking time each night to deliriously transcribe thesong ideas she’d dreamed up behind the wheel, often scrawling those notes ontothe backs of postcards and motel notepads. After completing two more tripsacross the U.S. on her own—and partly navigating her way with the help ofhand-drawn maps from self-styled historians of Route 66—Potter flew toNashville for a series of recording sessions that quickly gave way to her mostmagnificently unfettered collection of songs to date. Equal parts fearlesslyraw memoir and carnivalesque fable, the result is a body of work that goes farbeyond the typical album experience to deliver something much moreall-enveloping: the original motion picture soundtrack to a profoundlytransformative moment in Potter’s life, a fantastically twisted odysseypopulated by the hitchhikers and outlaws and other lifelong wanderers who roamthrough the wonderland of her psyche.

The follow-up to Daylight—a 2019 release that earned GRAMMY nominations for BestRock Album, and Best Rock Performance—MotherRoad marks the start of a thrilling new era of a career that’s includedturning out seven acclaimed albums, sharing the stage with the likes of TheRolling Stones, Robert Plant, and the Allman Brothers Band, and playing nearlyevery major music festival (in addition to launching her own festival,Burlington’s Grand Point North). Over the course of its 10 larger-than-lifetracks, the album fuses elements of soul, blues, country, and timelessrock-and-roll with masterful abandon, thanks to the vibrant musicianship ofPotter and her collaborators: legendary keyboardist Benmont Tench, guitaristNick Bockrath (Cage The Elephant), bassist Tim Deaux (The Whigs, Kings OfLeon), pedal-steel guitarist Dan Kalisher (Fitz And The Tantrums, Noah Cyrus),Potter’s longtime drummer Matt Musty, and her husband Eric Valentine (amulti-instrumentalist who plays everything from African lute to synth bass on Mother Road). Produced by Valentine(who’s also worked with Queens of the Stone Age, Slash, and Weezer) andrecorded at RCA’s famed Studio A, MotherRoad fully echoes the ecstatic catharsis of its recording sessions, aprocess that Potter alternately likens to a tantrum and a haunting. “I didn’thave any real intention of making a record; I just thought I’d get into a roomwith some friends and mess around with these unfinished ideas I’d beengathering,” she says. “But then an entire album fell out of me, including allthe lyrics—the blanks had been filled in, like my subconscious had createdfinished sentences spoken distinctly from the perspective of all thesecharacters that were living inside me.”

As she reveals, that explosion ofcreative energy followed a period of emotional crisis for Potter, a turn ofevents partly triggered by moving back to her hometown with her husband andyoung son a year into the pandemic. “There was a big piece of my heart thatwasn’t ready to go back to Vermont—it all happened about 10 years earlier thanI’d expected,” she says. “California had always felt like a new beginning, aplace where I was able to step into a community of like-minded weirdos, andthrough that first winter I started to feel trapped.” After suffering amiscarriage (a particularly brutal medical experience compounded by the factthat she’d unknowingly been carrying twins), Potter began treatment forclinical depression and soon decided to seek the solace and release she’dalways found on the road. “I used the rental-car shortage as an excuse to goget our car in Topanga, but the truth is I was going to probably have a fullmental breakdown if I didn’t step away from the pressure cooker of judgment,I’d placed on myself and my environment,” she says. “At first, I thought ofwhat I was doing as escapism, and I felt ashamed of that. But eventually Irealized I was giving myself permission to do what needed to be done for me toget better.”

Within days of that first road trip,Potter was overcome by memories of past adventures and began piecing togetherstories set in parallel realities and alternate timelines, each rooted in theunvarnished truth of her emotional experience. “Mother Road is a reframing of my understanding of my history,” shesays. “It’s an important and powerful perspective I’d never had until thisrecord, and the heart of it is my journey to self-reliance and a sense ofworthiness.”

Named for a line from The Grapes of Wrath—in which JohnSteinbeck refers to Route 66 the “the mother of all roads…the road of flight”—Mother Road opens on the soulful swaggerof its sublimely rowdy title track. “That song is my way of saying I’m notokay, and I’m hoping that the road will at least be my partner-in-crime on thisjourney, if not a healer,” says Potter, whose powerhouse voice lends the tracka certain incandescent grit. A world-weary plea for redemption (from thechorus: “Wherever I’m headed/Mama, don’t let it be down”), “Mother Road” alsomakes for a prime introduction to the album’s ingenious use of backgroundvocals. “All of those vocals are me, but each voice is a different character Iwas manifesting in the album,” Potter explains.Mother Road’smotley cast of characters includes the ghost of Waylon Jennings and anenigmatic road warrior named Lady Vagabond. On “Good Time,” meanwhile, Potterinhabits the role of a hellraiser called Brigitte as she serves up agroove-heavy sizzle reel of her real life’s wildest moments (e.g., “I breastfeda stranger once at an In-N-Out Burger/Stripped down to my skivvies and dancedacross the boulevard”). “Writing that song, I was thinking about all the timeswhen there were no boundaries between me and the world at large,” says Potter.“As you get older there’s this expectation that you need to fall in line, thatyou can’t keep living in a fantasy your whole life. But I don’t know aboutthat. Maybe we can.”

At the heart of Mother Road lies twoback-to-back tracks that together speak to the transcendent power of bendingreality and creating our own myths. Co-written byPotter and the Highwomen’s Natalie Hemby (a Grammy-winning songwriter whosecredits include tracks by Kacey Musgraves and Maren Morris), “LittleHitchhiker” brings Potter’s delicate piano melodies, luminous acoustic-guitarwork, and gorgeously longing vocals to a tender reflection on her experience asa nine-year-old runaway. Next, “Lady Vagabond” unfolds with spaghetti-westernbravado as Potter immortalizes the lawless superhero within. “To me sherepresents complete self-reliance and strength, and the permission to be asmischievous or as benevolent as you want to be,” says Potter. “She may not havea great grasp on everything else in the world—she may not even have thegreatest grasp on herself—but that’s okay.” 

For the closing track on MotherRoad, Potter offers up an epic piece of cabaret-pop touched with boththeatrical flamboyance and devil-may-care attitude. A bit of coming-of-ageautobiography in song form, the piano-led “Masterpiece” paints a picture of herlibertine young adulthood in irreverent and dazzling detail (“I was thelong-lost daughter of disco/Dancing thru my jock-strap dreams/In my funkylittle Fiat/Chasing down my Masterpiece”). “One of the silver linings of goingback home was driving by my high school every day and having all those memoriescome rushing back,” says Potter. “The kids I’d grown up with were there with amillion stories about me, and every story got weirder and wilder than the last.But I love that that’s how they remembered me, and I love that I’m still livingthose stories out through my songs.”

Evenin Mother Road’s most outrageousmoments, Potter infuses her songwriting with essential insight into the endlessnuances of life and love and belonging. True to the cinematic nature of Mother Road’s storytelling, she’s alsoimmersed herself in creating the album’s elaborate visual components, anundertaking that’s involved expanding her talents as a filmmaker and multimediaartist. “I know now that there’s more depth to my expression, and I feel readyto bring everything into focus under a much larger circus tent than I have inthe past,” she notes. And afterthousands of miles on the road, countless nights at seedy motels, and aheartrending return home, Potter has made her way to the kind of creativefreedom that leaves both artist and audience indelibly altered—a freedom that’sundeniably led to her masterpiece.