‘Off the Record’ Episode 15: Grace Potter on How Her “Masks Have Come Off” on Forthcoming Album

Grace Potter is ready to bare her soul on Trespasser. Ahead of the release of her seventh studio album, the singer sat down for a conversation about the LP on American Songwriter’s Off the Record podcast.

The album, Potter teased, sees her settling “into the honest-to-goodness reality of who I am.” That’s a major departure from her 2023 LP, Mother Road.

“I think in Mother Road, I was really, really seeking to understand my level of discontent for not having a place to go,” she told host Lisa Konicki. “[I was asking,] ‘Why do we wander? Why do we feel like we belong? Why do some people find so much comfort in staying in one place?’ The question had been: ‘What is wrong with me that I am this migratory creature that has to be constantly moving?’”

Since then, Potter said she’s “found a lot more forgiveness in that journey.”

“These songs are much more an expression of someone who is completely accepted that the way I move through the world is just as beautiful, and comfortable, and full of wildly impossible events and cinematic universes as someone who sits in a rocking chair on a porch watching the world go by,” she said. “Both things can exist. Both things can bring a great deal of peace.”

“I don’t need to posture as a good housewife and mom when that’s simply only one corner of who I want to be or ever had any interest in playing the role of,” Potter continued. “So I think the masks have come off… I like myself much more now.”

Grace Potter Shares How Her Travels Inspired Trespasser

The album took inspiration from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” as well as Potter’s own travels across the U.S. Potter penned “Lost Cafe,” for instance, when she was “feeling genuinely unsafe” in a motel room.

“I was nervously unpacking my beautiful guitar and my gorgeous cinematic camera and all these expensive things. I was like, ‘What are the odds that I just don’t ever get out of this hotel room alive?’” she said. “… And so what do I do as a performer? I’m like, ‘All right, I’m a murderer.’ And so in my mind I was like, ‘I’m going to stage this whole thing like I am trying to hide a body right now. I’m going to do the most unexpected things so that just in case someone’s watching, they do not want to get into my room.’”

“I just started laying out all of my sharpest items in a very OCD with the way a mercenary might clean their weapons and things,” Potter continued. “I really staged the whole thing like I was some kind of a 007 witch type thing.”

Nobody wound up messing with her, but that experience, coupled with having Dirty Harry on the TV, sparked the idea for the track.

Grace Potter Discusses “War on the Mountain”

Potter also goes on a “big, big emotional journey” on “War on the Mountain,” which she counts as her current favorite song on the album.

“Like ‘Hotel California,’ you go in, and you meet this character, this woman who has decided that she’s going to protect herself,” she said. “So we go from the voice where she finds the gold in the gold mine, and then she takes it, and she hoards it, and she becomes incredibly protective and insular.”

“She insulates herself from this dangerous world, but she’s also a bleeding heart, and she’s rescued all these animals, and she’s connected to nature. She’s connected to the creatures of the forest,” Potter continued. “And then in comes marching the mistress of delight, and clearly there’s some sisterhood between these two women and these two characters.”

While the song is about those two characters, Potter admitted that she was “obviously dealing with my own emotional landscape there of someone who is wanting to be steadfast and tending the hearth of her world and controlling and containing and building borders.”

Sonically, Potter said the track is “a real showpiece,” thanks in large part to the addition of the Vermont Symphony Orchestra.

“That song is epic,” she said. “To be able to perform it with an orchestra and my whole band, [it was] so powerful.”

Grace Potter Shares the Message Behind Her New LP

The whole LP came together with the help of Potter’s husband, music producer Eric Valentine.

“He’s the most patient human being on the planet. I am a chaos agent… I like to celebrate and innovate on these unexpected moments in our life,” she said. “Whereas he is someone who has folders for everything. He has an organized brain where I think he can really see what the seed of what I’m chasing down is long before I actually understand what I’m chasing down.”

Overall, when people listen to the album, Potter wants them to realize “that there are people crazier than you out there.”

“No matter how crazy you feel at any moment in your life, you can find solace in knowing that there is a weirder fire burning in a different dumpster somewhere right over the horizon,” she said. “If you take the trip, good luck. Bring pepper spray. Or you could just sit comfortably in the contents of your own safe space and take a listen and take a ride with me.”

Grace Potter on Her Friendship With Kenny Chesney

During the interview, in addition to looking forward, Potter looked back. She discussed a pivotal moment in her career, which came more than 15 years ago when she teamed up with Kenny Chesney for “You and Tequila.”

“Our friendship started in the studio that day,” Potter said. “I was wearing some kind of animal print, maybe nighty, maybe shirt, maybe dress type thing. He had never seen anything like it. He was just in his very unassuming black sweater, black beanie hat, super shy, hands in the pockets.”

“I was used to this bubbly forward-facing, public-facing person. And so to me, this humble guy that was just very quiet and very relaxed and happy to have me in the studio, there was a wonderful instant connection,” she continued. “Our first bond was over the TV show Eastbound & Down. And to this day he calls me April [in honor of Katy Mixon’s character on the show]. So whenever he was trying to get ahold of me and I’m not answering him, he’ll just text back again, ‘April.’”

As for if the pair will ever work together again, Potter teased, “We were literally just texting about it yesterday. That’s all I could say about that.”

Trespasser is due out Aug. 21.

The post ‘Off the Record’ Episode 15: Grace Potter on How Her “Masks Have Come Off” on Forthcoming Album appeared first on American Songwriter.