Grace Potter fans to get an emotional volcano at Somerset’s Master Musicians Festival

Take a listen to any of Grace Potter’s records – her early rocking works with the Nocturnals, the pop party piece “Midnight” or the more reflective and soul-savvy “Daylight” – and you will hear a sense of songcraft keenly amplified by any number of musical accents. Collectively, they serve as a sharp, absorbing and detailed introduction to one of the more commanding female rock artists to emerge over the past two decades.

But experiencing Potter in performance, as Central Kentucky will this weekend with a headlining performance at the Master Musicians Festival in Somerset, is akin to flipping a switch in a dark room. Her records, fine as they are, seem like mere blueprints to what is conjured onstage. Vocally, emotively and, obviously, musically, Potter is a volcano onstage. She knows it, too, although the reckoning took awhile to sink in.

“It took some time to understand what I really do out there,” said Potter of her onstage adventures. “There were times when I thought I was just a singer and a musician getting up there and doing my thing just like all the other musicians I’ve seen and loved. But the more I played with different musicians, the more I thought about how different everybody approaches live music, how completely and sincerely individualized the relationship between an audience and a performer can be, starting with the music and the setlist.

“As my career expanded, with the Nocturnals and ultimately on my own, one thing that happened was I watched the setlist become far less important to me than listening. As I’m making a loud, raucous noise, I’m actually listening. I’m like a radio tuning around to AM stations until I find something that fits that the whole audience. Every audience is completely different. Every single person who spends their hard-earned money for a ticket to a concert has a different thing that they want. It can be anything from ‘I just want to hear that one song I know that I love’ to ‘I need to cry today.’ Everybody shows up with a different expectation for the show, but I kind of hear them. I can hear that and see and feel what is being asked for. Most of the time, especially if I’m in a good mood, if I’m in a jolly mood, everybody gets exactly what they want.”

A Vermont native versed on Hammond organ and guitar (the electric Gibson Flying V, no less), Potter issued the first of four studio records with her Nocturnals band in 2005 at the age of 22. Titled “Nothing but the Water,” it bowed to decades of blues, soul and rock inspirations but with a bravado that was very much her own. The sound fell somewhere between the rootsy authority of Bonnie Raitt and the anthemic rock star command of Heart’s Ann Wilson. Ask her where the drive and spark of her music comes from, though, and she quickly points South.

“It was the Staples Singers and a song called ‘On My Way to Heaven.’ It was an old recording (released in 1957). The record itself wasn’t on that sort of floppy vinyl that most of my dad’s record collection had. It was hard. It was heavy to hold. It felt like it would break if you dropped it. That sound and the crackling, the intensity of hearing a family, a group of singers, breathing together with this passionate message… well, first of all, I was like, ‘Okay, that’s like no church I’ve ever been to. Where is that church. Take me there!’

“That influence from the South came in really early for me even though I’m a bumpkin hippie from Vermont growing up baling hay and painting houses. My soul and some kind of spirit within me was really, really, really charged up by Southern gospel music. It just started me on a path of, ‘Where is that from?’ and also what other music came from it. I found Al Green. I found Otis Redding. I started digging deeper and got into more of the Mississippi Delta blues style and then went down to New Orleans where I found out how ragtime music became honky tonk music which then went back to blues music which then stirred up the dance beat. This wasn’t in any music history class. I was just sitting with a big messy pile of vinyl around me, putting it all together not in the way it happened but the way it happened for me in my heart. And it just blew me away.

“Maybe imitation really is the greatest form of flattery. I just didn’t know any better. I didn’t know that white chicks from Vermont aren’t quite supposed to sing that way. But the sound in my voice… I wasn’t trying, I was just hearing music. That was what music sounded like, not this madrigal stuff that the choir teacher had us singing. That didn’t make any sense to me. The blues made sense to me. Gospel made sense to me. Soul music made sense to me. And rock n’ roll is all of those things put together and mashed up with a lot dirtier hair and bell bottoms.”

Potter’s solo career ignited with the 2015 album “Midnight,” a record rich with hook-heavy pop inspirations, and 2019’s far more roots-directed and inward looking “Daylight.” Both were produced by Eric Valentine. Potter and Valentine were married in 2017 and welcomed a son a year later. The latter record reflected those life changes.

“My songwriting style has always been almost prophetic, almost like looking into my own future and telling me a story I haven’t been told yet,” Potter said. “But with ‘Daylight,’ I was really there in it. I was drawing from beautiful transitions in life, like falling in love and becoming a mother and living in California and making a home for the first time that wasn’t a tour bus. All of that really fed into my songwriter self. I wasn’t pretending to be somebody else.”

In and around her own music, Potter also became a prolific collaborator, recording and performing with artists as varied as The Flaming Lips and Kenny Chesney.

“I was recently collaborating with Emmylou Harris. It was just for a live show, but we got to know each other really well because we enjoyed sitting around playing songs together and talking. I realized then that every collaboration I have done has had way more influence on me than I thought it did because it also has an influence on how people see me and hear me. I’m watching it change my crowd. I love that. That’s exactly what I think the beauty of life is all about – connecting and touching as many different types of people from as many walks of life as possible without alienating anyone.

“I’m so lucky to have a career that has touched as many people as it has. I’m excited to get out there and keep doing that, especially with my new music. I feel like I’m just getting started.

“I know as people get older, they tend to say that a lot. But it’s true. I see the whole thing now a little bit more like I’m looking at a painting in a museum and going, ‘Well, that’s cool. But I think I can do better. I think I’m going to use more fuchsia next time.”

Master Musicians Festival

Headlined by Grace Potter

When: July 15-16

Where: Somerset Community College, 808 Monticello St., Somerset

Tickets: $45-$65. Children 12 and under free with adult admission

Concert lineup: June 15 — Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives, Rayland Baxter, Bendigo Fletcher and more. June 16 — Grace Potter, The Wood Brothers, John R. Miller, S.G. Goodman and others.

Complete festival schedule of 25 acts, tickets: mastermusiciansfestival.org