Grace Potter

Back in summer 2021, Grace Potter took off on a solo cross-country road trip that would soon bring a life-saving reconnection with her most unbridled self. Heading out on Route 66 from her home in Topanga Canyon, the Vermont-born artist spent the coming weeks crashing in roadside motels and taking time each night to deliriously transcribe the song ideas she’d dreamed up behind the wheel, often scrawling those notes onto the backs of postcards and motel notepads. After completing two more trips across the U.S. on her own—and partly navigating her way with the help of hand-drawn maps from self-styled historians of Route 66—Potter flew to Nashville for a series of recording sessions that quickly gave way to her most magnificently unfettered collection of songs to date. Equal parts fearlessly raw memoir and carnivalesque fable, the result is a body of work that goes far beyond the typical album experience to deliver something much more all-enveloping: the original motion picture soundtrack to a profoundly transformative moment in Potter’s life, a fantastically twisted odyssey populated by the hitchhikers and outlaws and other lifelong wanderers who roam through the wonderland of her psyche.

The follow-up to Daylight—a 2019 release that earned GRAMMY nominations for Best Rock Album, and Best Rock Performance—Mother Road marks the start of a thrilling new era of a career that’s included turning out seven acclaimed albums, sharing the stage with the likes of The Rolling Stones, Robert Plant, and the Allman Brothers Band, and playing nearly every major music festival (in addition to launching her own festival, Burlington’s Grand Point North). Over the course of its 10 larger-than-life tracks, the album fuses elements of soul, blues, country, and timeless rock-and-roll with masterful abandon, thanks to the vibrant musicianship of Potter and her collaborators: legendary keyboardist Benmont Tench, guitarist Nick Bockrath (Cage The Elephant), bassist Tim Deaux (The Whigs, Kings Of Leon), pedal-steel guitarist Dan Kalisher (Fitz And The Tantrums, Noah Cyrus), Potter’s longtime drummer Matt Musty, and her husband Eric Valentine (a multi-instrumentalist who plays everything from African lute to synth bass on Mother Road).

Even in Mother Road’s most outrageous moments, Potter infuses her songwriting with essential insight into the endless nuances of life and love and belonging. True to the cinematic nature of Mother Road’s storytelling, she’s also immersed herself in creating the album’s elaborate visual components, an undertaking that’s involved expanding her talents as a filmmaker and multimedia artist. And after thousands of miles on the road, countless nights at seedy motels, and a heartrending return home, Potter has made her way to the kind of creative freedom that leaves both artist and audience indelibly altered—a freedom that’s undeniably led to her masterpiece.