Grace Potter Shares Stories From the Road Ahead of Denver Benefit

Grace Potter, the rock-and-roll soul queen known for her way with words, morphs into many things on her latest record, Mother Road. Whether it’s a lead-footed speed demon or a Western outlaw, she shifts seamlessly between alter egos across the ten latest tracks.

Inspired by a cross-country road trip along Route 66, Potter experienced an epiphany and, ultimately, the guiding vision for the new album, while sitting on the edge of California’s Amboy Crater. “‘Oh, this is a movie. This is not an album. This is an original motion picture soundtrack,’” she recalls thinking at the time.

A hand-drawn, crowdsourced map led her to the dormant cinder-cone volcano as Potter started her drive back to her original homeland of Vermont. It was there, in the Mojave Desert, that she embraced the weird ways of the Mother Road and the many personas it would spawn in her music.

“Every time I closed my eyes, I was thinking about the songs and what the record might sound like, but more than anything, I was seeing the songs,” she explains. “In my landscape behind my closed eyes, I was really aware of the vivid and visceral connections of what I’m looking at and how it turns into music.”

At that moment, she let go of all earthly constructs — including her physical form, at times — and allowed the muse to transform her, to show her the way. The songs were longing to be brought to life, and Potter wasn't afraid to let them take the lead. “There was an instantaneous quality and a really deep-rooted connection [going] back generations. I felt like I was seeing faces and flashes of people who'd either been killed or double-crossed,” Potter elaborates.

“I was a villain. I was a hero. I was a goddess. I was an underwater sea urchin. I was a fucking submarine,” she continues. “I turned into all these things, depending on sections of the music. From intro to first verse, you can go from an underwater spaceship to this beautiful sandy desert or the cliff that you jump off, which [is] the chorus.”

It’s trippy stuff, but that was just the beginning of Potter’s journey across the back roads of America. Route 66, once the major artery between California and Illinois, is now dotted with forgotten towns and relics nearly four decades after its 1985 decommission. A shadow of its former self, the highway with the nickname "Mother Road" is “totally forgotten and is creepily still there,” as Potter describes it.

“There’s a road there that can take you from one dream to another and from one heartbreak to another,” she continues. “The road tells the story really beautifully, just as much in its celebrated parts as in its forgotten parts.”

Potter kept notes on bar napkins and whatever scraps she could find in order to share a similar tale on Mother Road. Now she’s pounding the pavement once again and playing it live on tour. Potter stops in Denver on Friday, December 8, for the Sing It to Me Santa fundraiser at Mission Ballroom. A benefit for Take Note Colorado, the concert will also include Tracksuit Wedding and Ryan Chrys.

Potter is honored to play the event, and points to the song “Lady Vagabond,” which pays homage to her grandfather, whom she called “Padre,” and her time spent visiting him in Pagosa Springs while growing up. “She is, by the way, very much a Colorado-New Mexico import, in my mind,” she says of the song's title character. “There’s a lot of that story that comes from my real life and my time out west and love of the mountains and Colorado — specifically the feeling of getting lost in the mountains.”

Potter showcases her uncanny ability to channel certain landscapes, people and visions throughout Mother Road. Even when she hit the studio in Nashville to record, there were no complete songs yet. Instead, Potter pulled lyrics from her collection of road notes and became a conduit for all of her inspirations, including the spirit of Waylon Jennings, as she tells it.

“I’m pretty sure Waylon Jennings entered the room and space, or at least my spiritual zone, at some point,” Potter shares. “I know it sounds crazy to say, but I think that music teleports you to different times and places. Whatever you’re conjuring will show up for you, if you’re open to it.”

She’s quick to note that she doesn’t consider herself a mystic or medium. “I’m not trying to talk to ghosts. But voices come in and they say things. They have ideas and inspiration and fire,” she adds. “I really feel that I am simply a furnace that’s ready to be stoked. I’m open like an antenna.”

But the ghosts might be talking to her, further fueling her passion, if such songs as “Truck Stop Angels” and “All My Ghosts” are any proof. 

Potter, who is currently developing Mother Road into a film script, recognizes Route 66’s own transformation, the rise and fall of an Americana icon, and how the well-worn road can still change any who travel it.

“It’s like a woman who was made beautiful and shiny and has this promise of so much of the American Dream, and then became a shadow of herself and watched herself become forgotten,” she says.

“I like to imagine what it was like to be that road in the early days and carry so many people with so many hopes and dreams,” Potter concludes. “The road knows where she’s going — it’s the people on it who don’t know where they’re going to end up.”

Grace Potter, 7:30 p.m. Friday, December 8, Mission Ballroom, 4242 Wynkoop Street. Tickets are $40-$250.