WHEN ASKED TO sum up the theme of her dynamite new album, Mother Road (Fantasy), Grace Potter answers quickly and definitively: “Belonging,” she says. But as the singer-songwriter and guitarist hunts for words to expand on her explanation, it becomes clear that there’s a lot more to it than a simple one-word response. “Actually, that’s just part of it,” she says. “Along with a sense of belonging, there’s the alienation you can feel once you’ve declared your identity to yourself and the people around you. I wanted to understand my own feelings of alienation that started early on.”
As Potter explains, she grew up legally blind and earned bad grades. She recounts how she was kicked out of school bands because she couldn’t read music. “That all kind of plays with you, and you start to question where you fit in,” she says. “I just started to play music by ear, and I had this revelation that music and musicality were worlds apart.” She pauses. “Ultimately, fitting in became less important to me, and now I don’t even try.”
For a time, Potter had a comfortable place fronting Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, a hard-driving, roots-based quintet that included her then-husband and drummer, Matt Burr. Between 2005 and 2012, the band issued four well-received albums, but it was onstage where the outfit truly shined. A big and brassy singerabout instrumental showmanship — when she wasn’t laying it down with a Flying V, she was throwing her whole body into a Hammond B3 — Potter was very much the show’s focal point. “I think people got captivated by me, but I was captivated by the band,” she says. “I love playing in a band.”
