Grace-ful chat with a rock star mom headed back on the road to support spirited new album

PITTSBURGH ― It's a misty morning in Vermont, and Grace Potter has just dropped off her son, Sagan, at kindergarten, and is gung-ho to talk about her latest tour launching Nov. 1 at Stage AE.

In some cases, Potter will perform in venues twice-as-large as those she headlined three years ago, "so we've been playing around with the set design and the set pieces a lot," the singer-songwriter/soul-rocker said.

Can we expect to see her riding on a white horse across the dance floor as imagined in a dream sequence on her 3-month-old album, "Mother Road"?

"I couldn't get the clearance to actually get a white horse," she jokes, "but this is a cinematic experience and a performative album. I think all my songs that reflect the road from the old days are captured in this new context, which is really, really cool for me because I've got road songs from forever ago that are totally reimagined now. Not necessarily the sound of the song or the vibe or the power of it, but when you see me singing a song like 'Stop The Bus' now, as opposed to then, I wanted the visuals on stage to reflect the journey taken."

Sprinkled into the funky, feisty "Mother Road's" abundant wanderlust songs are cinematic references ranging from "Thelma & Louise" to "Thunder Road" to the climactic "Pulp Fiction" scene recreated and re-gendered in the music video for the album's title track.

"Ready Set Go" mentioning "five babies on the loose?"

Yes, that's a nod to the Coen Brothers' "Raising Arizona," Potter said.

"Those are the things that inspire me. All my favorite directors and filmmakers and stories," Potter said. "Used to be, you discovered music because it was part of an original motion soundtrack or you discovered like, 'oh, my god, did you hear Issac Hayes is doing the soundtrack to this new superhero movie, 'Shaft'"? One used to feed the other much better than they do now. Jimmy Cliff, 'The Harder They Come.' Cat Stevens, 'Harold and Maud.' I miss that era of movies and I celebrate when songs were living inside, like 'The Graduate.'

"I loved when I was with Disney being able to just carte blanche write a song about a story that wasn't mine (the ending song to 2010's "Tangled.") And that was the tool I used on this album: Let's pretend 'Mother Road' is a movie and I'm writing the original motion soundtrack to it."

The album cover resembles a movie poster, with a below-the-waist closeup of a woman in tight jeans, standing in the middle of a desert highway.

"That's me. I actually did the graphic design myself. It so much fits the words 'Mother Road'" Potter said. "The image is from me in selfie mode in a vertical video while my kid is running around in the background while I'm folding laundry. This pair of jeans had come out of the dryer, and they had shrunk. I put them on to see if they still buttoned up. I had to lay on the ground to get the damn things to button up, and so then I stood up to the camera and said, 'Haha, look what I did today.' It was just a video I sent to Eric (Valentine, her record producer husband). And then I took a screenshot of that and kind of photoshopped it like a Goldie Hawn poster."

The desert background was from a 2021 photo Potter snapped on a solo cross-country trek with a point-and-shoot camera. She initially intended her photoshop effort to be a mockup for a professional photographer and album cover designer, "but I got so attached to my artwork I just kept it."

The album's lyrics were borne out of reflective thinking that came naturally as she approached 40.

"All the pieces of my life started feeling like they were adding up to something bigger than just being a singer-songwriter that goes out and plays show," Potter said. "And while not minimizing the miles that have gone under me, I'm kind of acknowledging them and honoring them and celebrating them in way I hadn't done before. I think I was taking them for granted. I was always just, 'oh, back to the grindstone, here we go, be a road dog.'"

"To me, there's something much more beautiful and evolved and taking all those miles I've driven and building a narrative around it that is equal parts escapism and almost superrealism because it sounds unbelievable, but some of the real things that happened to me, you wouldn't believe," she continued. "Stranger than fiction type of stuff. So, I think building a little bit of fiction around it was a buffer for my own needing to step out and take a birds-eye view of my whole life."

Many of the songs reference ghosts from the past, and at one point she surmises her ghosts are so messed up, she's no longer frightened by them.

"It's a little bit of the humorous approach, where I'm trying to get away from something and that might set it free. As you can tell from this album, I'm still pretty tethered and still wrestling with a bunch of demons. They're still sticking around, so I might as well party with them (laughs.)"

The ghosts of Covid still linger for many. Potter's Jan. 23, 2020 concert at a sold-out Roxian Theatre was one of the last big Pittsburgh-area shows before the pandemic shut down the concert industry that year. She rocked a flying-V guitar that night, but mostly stood to play a churchy sounding organ as her band harmonized like an angel choir.

She wore a cheery yellow top, "and I remember that yellow outfit very clearly," Potter said. "It's funny, every time someone tells me about a show they've seen I'll ask, 'What was I wearing?' because I remember everything about the moment once I remember what I was wearing."

This upcoming tour features the same core band; Kurtis Keber on bass; Jordan West on drums, plus two new members, as keyboardist-percussionist Eliza Hardy Jones (also of The War on Drugs) takes maternity leave.

"She is at home in Philly enjoying her beautiful newborn and living La Vida Momma," Potter said.

The tour lasts through March, hitting the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y. on Jan. 19; The Paramount in Huntington, N.Y. on Jan. 24; Count Basie Center for The Arts in Red Bank, N.J. Jan. 25 and The Anthem in Washington D.C. on Jan. 27.

On Dec. 6, Potter joins The Gaslight Anthem and Iron & Wine in a one-off at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Later in 2024, she supports country star Chris Stapleton on a handful of dates.

It's a busy schedule for Potter, who seems well-balanced in her roles as rocker and mother.

She proudly noted Sagan is "kicking a--." in kindergarten.

Like mother, like son.

Scott Tady is entertainment editor at The Times and easy to reach at stady@gannett.com

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Grace Potter headed back our way to support spirited new album