Vermont rocker Grace Potter - mother and 'road warrior' - discusses her new album

Brent Hallenbeck, Burlington Free Press

Wed, August 16, 2023 at 9:14 AM UTC

9 min read

MORETOWN ― The title of Grace Potter’s new album, “Mother Road,” sums up her life aptly. She became a mother for the first time five years ago, when she and husband, record producer Eric Valentine, brought their son, Sagan, into the world.

The Waitsfield-raised rocker is also known as a “road warrior,” as she puts it. So “Mother Road” is all about Potter’s life, right?

Yes. And also not.

In a sprawling, metaphysically-leaning conversation outside the recording studio and barn in Moretown near her home, Potter (a die-hard space and sci-fi fan) talked with the Burlington Free Press about the imaginative origins of the songs on “Mother Road,” which comes out Aug. 18. Fans of her music can focus on the album to decipher the stories that infuse the songs, or they can just listen to the big, sassy voice and blues-toned rock that have fueled her career for two decades.

Potter also discussed returning to Vermont after moving to Los Angeles, and her complicated relationship with her home state. She plays two sold-out shows Sept. 15-16 at the Shelburne Museum.

Vermont rocker Grace Potter's album "Mother Road" comes out Aug. 18, 2023.

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’

For the songs that would appear on “Mother Road,” Potter began exploring a thread of traversing the multiverse, the idea of differing realities unfolding at the same time. Then the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” came out …

“’Mother Road’ was mostly about the roads not taken, but also, I don’t feel the regret of roads not taken because I’ve just sort of come to understand that maybe they all got taken and they’re all existing all at the same time – everything everywhere all at once. The songwriting for ‘Mother Road’ started that way, where I was like, ‘OK, so, in this version of my life I ran away from home at the age of 9 and I died. In this version of my life I ran away from home and the people took me in, and then I just kept pretending to be the girl that I – I just made up this lie that my name was Lola and that I was an orphan.’

“I think the could-have-been is there, somewhere, in the collective consciousness, in other people’s lives, and maybe even in sort of the dark matter that we can’t touch or feel or see or sense, you know?

“Anyways, that was when I was sort of forming a film and a conceptual album around ‘Mother Road’ being this woulda-coulda-shoulda, multi-dimensional astral plane, everything’s happening all at once thing. And then I saw the damn movie and I was like, ‘(expletive)! All right, I missed my window.’”

Echoes of ‘Barbie,’ too

After the Oscar-winning success of “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” Potter shifted her storyline slightly. The focus of “Mother Road,” she said, became “not necessarily the roads we actually take but the roads that our brains will take, our imaginations,” the storytelling we all engage in.

“So I’m basing it around this old woman, who is me, who is also the runaway – she ran away from 1930s Americana, you know, Ken Burns documentary-style, and then turns into this wild enchantress storyteller, telling campfire stories all along Route 66 and winning over hearts and minds … She creates characters to cope to a degree where her life becomes this fantasy world that she lives in. She gets wild success in the ‘50s and ‘60s, she develops all these different characters and storylines that intertwine because they all come from her mind. But those characters are real, and they’re living out their lives and they’re stuck in their stories that she’s made for them, but she’s done such a beautiful job of creating and contextualizing these characters that they don’t know that they’re a creation from somebody’s mind.

“And then at a certain point, Lola develops Alzheimer’s, and so she begins to lose the thread of what is real and which one of her characters belongs in which setting, what happened to which character, and she starts to sort of swap them out and gets confused about which one goes where, to a degree where it’s terrifying to these characters ...

“And so when Lola finally realizes that this is what the characters are going through and that it’s scary for them, she sets them free … I watched ‘Barbie’ and that’s exactly what the (expletive) woman (Ruth Handler, inventor of Barbie) does in ‘Barbie,’ and I’m like, ‘Dammit, dammit, dammit!’”

Songs of regret and longing

The songs may have derived from lofty, multilayered thoughts. But Potter said they’re really built around basic human feelings.

“’Mother Road’ is all about exploring regret, and also, hopefully, finding acceptance. But really the density of my longing, it’s kind of outsized in a way where it’s really difficult to be present. It’s easier to be present going 90 miles an hour down the highway for me sometimes than it is for me to be present, you know, in the middle of a meadow in Vermont. At least at the time it was, and that was when I was doing these road trips back and forth (to Los Angeles), and COVID also made me want to run away from everything and just sort of rip my clothes off and feel free.

“So this album is a manifestation of that regret, that longing, and ultimately trying to find the acceptance but not really getting there.

“I think shame is another theme in the album. I was called a liar all the time until I put it to song. Once I put it into a song it wasn’t a lie, it was imaginative and creative.

“I’d come home from school and tell my mom that Shirley Temple had been in school that day and that she taught me how to tap dance and I taught her how to ski, and that’s why I didn’t have my lunchbox, ‘cause Shirley Temple took it.

“That was my imagination in overdrive, trying to create an understanding of reality. The way that adults respond to that does inform the world that you live in, just like the stories that you tell as you get older to yourself, whether it’s a conspiracy theory or a spiritual practice or a deity that you’ve chosen to idolize – those things are only true because you’ve built them to feel true. I find that as I get older, I need to place less value in that quote-unquote ‘truth,’ because most of the pain I’ve experienced in my life is because I’m trying to follow a narrative that destroyed my happiness.”

Vermont vs. California

Following the birth of Sagan, Potter and Valentine moved to Vermont, mere miles from where Potter grew up. They retain their home outside Los Angeles, and Potter admits it’s complicated when asked what she considers “home” right now.

“I’m here (in Vermont) and I feel this obligation to say that this is home, but it’s not. But here’s what it is. It is based on the functional reality that I must exist inside of, in which I don’t want my kid to grow up with a bunch of (expletive) friends that drive G-Wagons and have more money than God, I want him to understand about a hard day’s work and I want him to live in a place where nature is already clearly more powerful than any machine or toy or shiny new object or app.

“I also have an amazing backbone of family here. It’s increasingly so where my parents are here but also all of my aunts and uncles, two sets of cousins, all of whom are getting married and having kids. There are so many real friends that I’ve reconnected with since I’ve been back in Vermont …

“We came here and this property, my school bus has driven by this field every day since I was a kid. I never thought in a million years that this would be a place that I could ever afford to live. Nor did I really picture it being that end of the rainbow. It 100%, without a doubt in his mind, in his loins, was the end of Eric’s rainbow. And that’s really why we’re back here.

“California, I mean, I gave birth to my son there, I set down my roots there … I was living my Joni Mitchell ending that I had written for my story, and it was a bummer to find myself in a position where I knew that the best thing for myself, for my love, for my son, for my family, was to be with them (in Vermont).

“By the time I realized that I wasn’t done living out that happy ending, we had bought this place and we were under construction and things were underway in a way that made me feel extremely powerless, because there was a lot of ‘should.’ I ‘should’ be grateful, I ‘should’ feel no remorse about this choice, it’s the best choice, it’s the safe choice.”

Reconciling with home

Potter did find peace with returning to Vermont. That process has found its way into her new album.

“I did care about coming back here. I care about everybody here, and it tapped into some emotional trauma from growing up and being the odd duckling in school, which I cover very much in the song ‘Masterpiece.’

“’Masterpiece’” really touches on all of those extremely embarrassing, deviant, pressure-cooker feelings of young adulthood, but also a young creative adult who wants to be taken seriously and continues to flail. The more honest I am about who I am and what I’m interested in, the more resistance I came up against.

“I think leaving and going and becoming a successful musician was my way of, you know, emancipating myself from the shame of being the ‘bad kid’ or being the outcast.

“Suddenly I went from being the outcast to being like, ‘Vermont’s own Grace Potter!’ It was a weird feeling to have. I’ve worked through a lot of things since then, but in the writing of this album and the driving across the country a bunch of times, I was really looking for where I belonged. I was looking for a tether back to a reality where I was able to find forgiveness in myself, and for everybody else who were kind of total (expletive) heads (laughs) … But, you know, I got there. And it took four (expletive) cross-country trips to get there. It doesn’t mean I found where I belong.

“(T)his is exactly at the heart of the album, and of all the dimension-hopping, all the storytelling and all the deconstructing of the storytelling and all the setting free of all these characters. It’s really about realizing that that story of me being the outcast kid is also just that.

“Coming back here was so important for me, and so healing, and so grounding – but not at first. Not at first. And now, this has been almost four years since we moved back here, every step of the way I have continued to ask myself, ‘Where is home? Where do I belong? Is there a home?’ I’m pretty clear that it is like a solid 50-50 now. It really is. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be reflected in the amount of time I spend in either place because now, with ‘Mother Road’ coming out, I plan on being out on the road for a very large portion of this year and next. And then I’m going to follow up ‘Mother Road’ with all the other songs I recorded, which is a whole other album that’s going to immediately follow ‘Mother Road.’”