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. The Vermont-born artist spent the coming weeks crashing in roadside motels and taking time each night to 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 on her own—Potter flew to Nashville for a series of recording sessions that resulted in her most magnificently unfettered collection of songs to date. Equal parts fearlessly raw memoir and carnivalesque fable, Mother Road is a body of work that goes far beyond the typical album experience.
“Mother Road is a reframing of my understanding of my history,” she says. “It’s an important and powerful perspective I’d never had until this record, and the heart of it is my journey to self-reliance and a sense of worthiness.” The follow-up to 2019’s Daylight—a release that earned GRAMMY nominations for Best Rock Album, and Best Rock Performance—Mother Road fuses elements of soul, blues, country, and timeless rock-and-roll with masterful abandon. 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.