Grace Potter

Everyone who watched the ABC variety series Donny & Marie knows the show’s most famous song, “A Little Bit Country, A Little Bit Rock ‘N Roll,” a cutesy little ditty that the cutesy little hosts sang every Friday night from January ’76 to May ‘79. And though the show went off the air more than four years before Grace Potter was born, the song’s lyrics describe her decidedly uncutesy sound to a tee since she combines “a little bit of Memphis and Nashville and a little bit of Motown” into virtually everything she does (along with a little bit of funk and a little bit of other stuff), becoming one of the millennial generation’s brightest musical stars in the process.

Countless reviews have likened Potter’s singing to that of Bonnie Raitt, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams and Janis Joplin, Stephen Holden of The New York Times once described her a “grittier Patty Griffin,” and a number of critics have said that her gregarious personality and tendency to drop f-bombs makes her the opposite of the “female singer-songwriter” stereotype, none of which seems to faze the native Vermonter for a second. “They can compare me to anyone they want as long as it gets people to come out and see the show,” Potter said in an interview with International Musician magazine in 2014. Whether belting out a tune, wailing on her Flying V or throwing her entire body into a Hammond B-3, she’s established herself as an artist who eschews standard classification and is among the Green Mountain State’s most celebrated musical exports along with Rudy Vallée, Dan Tyminski, Prydein and Phish.

Potter has recorded seven solo albums over the past 25 years in addition to four studio albums and four live albums with Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. A three-time Grammy nominee, she was nominated for Best Local Female Artist and Vocalist of the Year at the 2005 Boston Music Awards (when Grace Potter & The Nocturnals received nominations for Album of the Year and Best New Local Act) and in 2011 co-founded the Grand Point North festival in Vermont, at which artists including Jackson Browne have appeared. Potter’s rock ‘n’ roll street cred increased exponentially in 2012 when Gibson launched a signature guitar in her honor, the Grace Potter Flying V, and it increased even further in 2015 when she toured North America with The Rolling Stones as the band’s opening act.

MUSICIAL BEGINNINGS, INFLUENCES, FIRST ALBUM

Born June 20, 1983, Potter grew up in an artist commune on a farm, Hobbitville, near Waitsfield, Vermont, a town of some 1,800 about 40 miles from jam-band mecca Burlington. Both her parents are graphic artists but her mother is also a piano teacher, so she was exposed to a wide variety of music from a very early age. “My mom would sometimes sing a full throttle opera calling the animals in for dinner,” she told International Musician. Another key part of her early musical education was her parents’ record collection, which she says gave her “access to what real rock ‘n’ roll was.” Along with listening regularly to “every single Beatles record,” Potter was especially drawn to Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. “I remember loving Dylan and I didn’t understand how anyone with such a bad voice could get on records,” she told International Musician, adding that she’s never had any formal vocal training. “I never took to the whole voice lesson thing,” she said. “It was too bizarre.”

Potter is legally blind in one eye, which resulted in her doing poorly in school, she says, and she was kicked out of several bands while in her teens because she sang and played piano very well but couldn’t read music. As a direct result, she’s walked a thoroughly independent artistic path ever since, she says. “That all kind of plays with you, and you start to question where you fit in,” she told Joe Bosso of Guitar Player in 2023. “I just started to play music by ear, and I had this revelation that music and musicality were worlds apart. Ultimately, fitting in became less important to me, and now I don’t even try.”

In 2000, Potter self-released her first album, Hit the Ground, a seven-track disc that includes four originals, and in 2001 she enrolled at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where she majored in theatre for two years. Wanting to broaden her musical range, she began playing guitar as a freshman. “There are too many girls sitting behind pianos. I wanted to be a multi-instrumentalist, fight that mystique of the one-shtick, girl-piano thing,” she told Bosso.

GRACE POTTER & THE NOCTURNALS

In 2002, drummer and St. Lawrence student Matt Burr heard Potter singing at an open-mic night and asked if she would form a band with him. She turned down the offer, but reconsidered after her high school friend and bass player Courtright Beard enrolled at the school later that year; Burr, Potter and Beard formed a trio and the group expanded into a quartet shortly afterward with the addition of guitarist-harmonicist Scott Tournet. They named the band Grace Potter & The Nocturnals (since they often rehearsed late at night) and became a regular presence at The Java Barn, a student-run venue near the campus. In 2002, Potter cut her second LP, the 11-track Red Shoe Rebel, which features only her (on vocals and piano); it includes four originals and covers of songs by John Prine, Suzanne Vega, Lyle Lovett, Cyndi Lauper, Sting and Van Morrison.

In the spring of 2003, Potter, Burr and Tournet moved to Vermont and bassist Bryan Dondero replaced Beard, who decided to continue his schooling at St. Lawrence. Encouraged by her bandmates, Potter started playing the organ, which has since become a staple of her acoustic arsenal. “They wanted me to find an instrument that would help me spread my vocal wings since I used to sing quietly,” she told International Musician. The band’s rise to renown began in the summer of 2003 when they landed a regular spot at Nectar’s, a popular restaurant/bar in Burlington where Phish launched their career, which allowed them to build a following; that led to months of touring and strong reviews in Rolling Stone, Paste, USA Today and other national publications.

In 2004, Potter recorded her third solo album, Original Soul, at Charles Eller Studios in Charlotte, Vermont, backed by Nocturnals members, organist Chuck Weller and several guest vocalists. Grace Potter & The Nocturnals self-released their debut studio LP, Nothing But the Water, in May 2005 and their first live disc, Live Oh Five, later in the year. In December 2005, the group signed with Hollywood Records, which re-released Nothing But the Water in May 2006, and they spent most of the next two years on the road playing festivals and venues across the US including the Paradise Rock Club, the Orpheum Theatre, Toad’s Place, The Living Room, Iron Horse Music Hall and The Stone Church.

Hollywood issued three more Grace Potter & The Nocturnals studio albums, the first being 2007’s This is Somewhere, which peaked at #119 in the Billboard 200 but reached #1 in Billboard’s Heatseekers chart. The band’s self-titled third LP, which included new members Benny Yurco (guitar) and Catherine Popper (bass), came out in 2010 and also topped the Heatseekers chart, and the band’s last record, 2012’s The Lion The Beast The Beat, became their most successful, climbing to #2 in Billboard’s Top Tastemaker Albums chart, #7 in Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart and #17 in the Billboard 200. The group supported their final LP with months of touring that took them across North America, the UK, Europe and Australia.

GRAMMY NOMINATION, LATER SOLO ALBUMS

Potter’s national profile soared when she received her first Grammy nomination in 2012 (Best Country Duo/Group Performance for “You and Tequila,” recorded with Kenny Chesney), and in she Nocturnals drummer Burr got married in May 2013. They divorced in early 2015, however, which spelled the end of The Nocturnals, and Potter returned to her solo career, recording 2015’s Midnight on the Hollywood label. Produced by Eric Valentine (who co-wrote 11 of the album’s 12 songs with Potter and has been her husband since 2017), the LP hit #26 in the Billboard 200 and reviews were generally positive, but its slick production drew sharp criticism from those who preferred her edgier Nocturnals material, including The Boston Globe’s Steve Morse, who dismissed the album as “a disaster” and “a cheesy plunge into dance-pop that shows a crass haste to grab Top 40 radio play.”

Potter recorded her next two albums on Fantasy Records, each produced by Valentine: Daylight (2019), which peaked at #74 in the Billboard 200 and earned Grammy nominations for Best Rock Album and Best Rock Performance, and Mother Road, which made it to #34 in Billboard’s Independent Albums chart. Her most recent studio outing is the T Bone Burnett-produced Medicine, which Hollywood issued in May 2025. Interestingly, the tracks were recorded in 2008 and 2009 (with an all-star cast of studio cats including Jim Keltner, Marc Ribot, Dennis Crouch and Keefus Ciancia), but the label decided not to release the album at the time. Asked why she thought Hollywood had made that decision, Potter said it was because of the image its execs wanted to present of the then 25-year-old sensation. Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group (which distributes the Hollywood label), was “concerned that the record would age me,” she told Mark Yarm of The New York Times in May 2025. “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’”

“This whole thing is basically just a Richard Linklater movie,” Potter told Chris Willman of Variety in March 2025, likening Medicine to one of the films Linklater has made over a period of many years. Asked what she thinks of the disc now, nearly two decades after recording it, she said it’s an excellent example of what she tries to accomplish whenever she’s making a record. “It really just stands up to all of the things I’ve always done,” she told Willman. “I’ve always aimed to be timeless, but I’ve grown more immature over the years, so this brings back some of that maturity, I think.”

(by D.S. Monahan)