Grace Potter’s new solo album, “Mother Road,” is an ode to freedom and the open road. She wrote it during cross-country trips she started taking in summer 2021, leaving her home in Topanga Canyon to reflect on her life, music, and the COVID pandemic.
When it comes to the album’s title, Potter tells KCRW that she didn’t think a lot about the double entendre.
“I'm also a mother, and I grew up on the road. … I'm a road warrior. But initially, it came from the fact that I chose to take Route 66, which famously in the book, ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ John Steinbeck referred to as the mother of all roads … bringing people in the Dust Bowl out to California, to the promised land, and the American dream and all the shadowy places that exist around that. … I did four cross country trips total on Route 66 before finalizing and penning the album and deciding to name it ‘Mother Road.’”
This is Potter’s third solo album since she left the rock band the Nocturnals (after she divorced bandmate/drummer Matt Burr in 2015, the group disbanded). She says it represents her staking her claim “in the wild west that is rock and roll.”
Potter wrote the songs while struggling with her mental health during the pandemic. She had also suffered a life-threatening miscarriage, which she initially did not fully process.
“The residual effects of it were establishing themselves in my physiology in a way that I wasn't really aware of. And in my mental space, I just brushed it aside, when really, there was some pretty real stuff that I still needed to work through. … It was very real, and the details of which I got to sort through in the quiet and solitude of the road, in a way that I hadn't allowed myself to have when I was home in Vermont or when I was working … in California, cranking away on a record or touring. There was nothing to do except sit with those feelings, and it was powerful.”
Taking those trips meant taking time away from her husband and child. She acknowledges, “It was hard being away from them. And I didn't know how empty that feeling would be until I felt it out on the road. And I was a solid 2000 miles away from them.”
Still, Potter has always been ready to get up and move. One of the songs on the album, “Ready Set Go,” exemplifies that.
“I've always enjoyed the packing of the car, and the adventure, and trusting that the universe is going to throw you a bone. This is the pinball in the pinball machine of life. It's a younger me. It's a more innocent me. It's a slightly aimless me. But there's some wisdom to be gleaned.”