Photo credit: Pamela Neal
Grace Potter
Grace Potter has no complaints about her life today, but she could easily have offered a different assessment not long ago. “I’m living my best life, as they say,” Potter remarks. “It’s just pretty magical.”
The journey that has taken Potter to this place, though, was anything but easy. Her long-time band, the Nocturnals, fell apart; she divorced her first husband and Nocturnals’ drummer, Matt Burr; took a major left turn with her music; became estranged from music altogether; and eventually found new love, a new marriage and had a baby son—all before re-emerging with her stirring and uncommonly honest new solo album called Daylight.
Now Potter is on her first tour in some four years, and she’s clearly ready to be back performing in front of fans who waited five years for new music. And she has plenty to say in songs from Daylight chronicling some of the life-changing events and complex emotions Potter has experienced.
The saga began before Potter released her 2015 album, Midnight, her first solo effort. Its more modern pop-oriented sound marked a considerable departure from the soulful, rootsy and rocking music that Potter had made with the Nocturnals. She planned to make Midnight with the Nocturnals, but that didn’t happen. While Burr remained supportive of the project (and played in Potter’s Midnight touring band), guitarist and songwriting contributor Scott Tournet objected and left. As she dove into recording and then touring behind Midnight, Potter began to realize there were issues in her marriage to Burr.
“Then I had this ability to see clearly how much of our relationship was about music and touring and how much of it was about being in love,” Potter says. “I think whenever you live on the road with somebody and your life and career are tied up, those complicated layers start to reveal themselves, and that’s what happened.”
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Potter made Midnight with producer Eric Valentine. They got along famously, but it wasn’t until after touring Midnight that she started to realize she wasn’t just attracted to Valentine for his producing skills. It took a couple of months, but Potter concluded she was in love and had to reveal her feelings to Valentine. He was blindsided by this revelation.
“He didn’t know what to do with me when I told him that,” Potter says with a hearty laugh. “He needed time when I told him how I felt. He took an evening to think about it before he was able to reciprocate and kind of acknowledge what he was feeling.” The couple has been together ever since, and in January 2018, they had a baby boy.
After a period when she wasn’t interested in making music, Potter began writing songs in late 2017 about what she had been through. She initially thought they were too personal to release, but eventually decided to share them and began working in earnest on Daylight.
Musically, Potter wanted Daylight to be different than Midnight, and that meant a shift back to a leaner, more organic, guitar-oriented sound more akin to her music with the Nocturnals. Daylight has ballads like the slow burning “Love Is Love” and the country-ish “Repossession”; rowdy rockers like “On My Way”; and tunes that fall between those extremes such as “Back To Me” and the earthy, acoustic-centric “Every Heartbeat.” Potter plays keyboards and guitar.
Her current tour’s song selections vary from show to show, and Potter feels her band can roll with such spontaneity.
“It’s one of the benefits of having a talkback microphone on stage where I can tell the band ‘OK, never mind, ignore the set list. This audience just wants to dance,’” she says. “So, we’re just dancing for the next five songs, or whatever it is. That’s what I love about this band is that this is some of the most fluid, effortless musicians I’ve ever worked with.”
Grace Potter performs at the Pabst Theater on Thursday, Feb. 6, at 8 p.m.
