In May 2009, Hollywood Records announced that T Bone Burnett — the producer of the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss LP “Raising Sand,” which dominated the Grammys earlier that year — had recently entered the studio with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals to produce the band’s new album. The LP, which would be the Vermont-based bluesy roots-rock group’s third, was slated to come out that fall.
The label didn’t mention that the album was in fact a solo vehicle for Potter, then 25, that she recorded with a team of renowned session musicians: the drummer Jim Keltner, the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Dennis Crouch and the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia. “She was like a ball of fire,” Keltner recalled of Potter in a phone call, “and she was really fun to follow.”
During an interview in March at her eclectically decorated villa in Topanga, Calif., Potter — a multi-instrumentalist whose soulful voice has earned her comparisons to Bonnie Raitt, Janis Joplin and “a grittier Patty Griffin” — recounted her sense of anticipation over the release of the LP, “Medicine.”
“It really felt like something exciting on the horizon,” Potter said, sitting on the couch in her living room dressed in a stylish forest-green jumpsuit. “It was like the secret that we got to keep until it all came out.” Sixteen years earlier, she had described the record as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing” than her earlier output.
Then Hollywood shelved the album. The label wanted Potter and the Nocturnals to rerecord the songs with the producer Mark Batson, known for his work with Alicia Keys, the Dave Matthews Band and Dr. Dre. Potter blamed an A&R executive, whom she declined to name, for the decision.
She also said that Bob Cavallo, then the chair of the Disney Music Group, which distributes the Hollywood label, was “concerned that the record would age me.” She added, “I’m a young, hot thing. He was like, ‘We don’t want her to seem like she’s 46.’” (In a phone interview, Cavallo, now 85 and retired, couldn’t recall the particulars of the label’s move, but expressed regret that he couldn’t help Potter “get a giant career, because I thought she deserved one.”)
The switch-up blindsided Potter. “I was totally heartbroken,” said the musician, who turns 42 next month. “And I thought about T Bone and our connection and the triangulation of our creativity.” She added, “Like, was it all for nothing? That seems crazy.”
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals ended up working with Batson. The resulting 2010 self-titled record featured new versions of eight songs from the “Medicine” sessions. It debuted at No. 19 on the Billboard 200, and included perhaps the band’s most enduring single, “Paris (Ooh La La),” a supercharged version of a “Medicine” track.
The band released one more LP, “The Lion the Beast the Beat” from 2012, before breaking up three years later. Potter said the Nocturnals’ dissolution was the result of intraband strife and her desire to go solo, not, as is widely believed, her divorce from the group’s drummer, Matt Burr.
And now, one decade, another marriage and three solo albums later, Potter’s “Medicine” is finally getting a proper release, via Hollywood, on May 30. Burr, who today runs a music studio in Puerto Rico and goes by Matteo, said that he’d always known that the record, with its “mystical T Bone Americana magic,” was timeless: “It was going to be something that you could grab a shovel and dig it up and put it out, and it would be as fresh as it sounded the day it was mastered.”
Over the course of nearly four hours, Potter discussed the drama surrounding “Medicine,” and chatted about her other musical endeavors and her colorful personal life. The singer, who occasionally sneaked a hit from her vape, proved as charismatic as she was voluble — “endless fun,” as one of Potter’s past collaborators, the country star Kenny Chesney, put it in an email: “She sees every day, every moment, every little thing she’s doing as a bottomless adventure.”
Potter grew up in Waitsfield, Vt., the middle child of Peggy and Sparky, artisans who helped found Dream On Productions, which traveled the world putting on photo slide shows accompanied by music. Potter recalled a bohemian youth, which included dropping acid and two arrests for public nudity, none of which fazed her folks.
“The hardest thing about having really cool parents is that you can’t out-cool your parents,” she said.
Potter had a natural affinity for music, and it gave her a way to differentiate herself. “I just wanted to be famous,” she said. “Sounds so crass and weird to say, but at the heart of it, I really feel like it was the only thing my parents chose not to do.” Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, which she helped found at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York in 2002, was her ticket to that life.
She dropped out after her sophomore year to focus on the group, but by the time Burnett expressed interest in working with her, Potter was yearning to strike out on her own, much to the chagrin of her bandmates: “They would always say, ‘Don’t go Gwen Stefani on us.’”
For years after recording “Medicine,” Potter resisted that urge. In 2014, she and the Nocturnals began working with the producer Eric Valentine, and over time, she and Valentine developed feelings for one another.
“I really enjoyed hanging out with Grace and making music with Grace,” said Valentine, who by this point in the interview had joined her on the couch. “But I wouldn’t let my brain make that leap to, like, ‘OK, I think I’m in love with this person.’”
Potter, who had been married to Burr since 2013, said she was similarly reluctant when it came to Valentine, who is 14 years her senior and was also in a long-term relationship. After much angst and deliberation, she and Valentine ultimately hooked up.
Potter was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when she married Valentine in December 2017. Valentine has produced all of his wife’s post-Nocturnals solo records, including her most recent, the twangy and soulful “Mother Road,” which came out in 2023 and Potter described as “an original motion picture soundtrack to an invisible movie.”
When Potter decided she wanted to make “Mother Road” into a “visible movie” — she is now in the pitching stage — she got to thinking about the “Medicine” album. “That record has so many cinematic gems,” she said. “So much of it is a sonic movie.”
So she had her manager reach out to Hollywood, which still had a digital recording in the vault. “It was so good,” Potter said of listening to “Medicine” again after so many years. “I was like, ‘This is wild that this didn’t get out.’” Hollywood, she said, readily agreed to release it.
Potter, who sang the national anthem at the Kentucky Derby earlier this month and will open for Chris Stapleton at Madison Square Garden in July, said she intended to tour behind “Medicine.” She described the impending release of the long-shelved album — which strikes a moody, more ethereal tone — in empowering terms.
“I don’t owe anybody loyalty to stick around or not stick around,” Potter said. “I don’t owe people a well-behaved or an ill-behaved version of me. I don’t owe it to myself to do my makeup and look beautiful for the world or gain or lose weight or have a baby or not have a baby.”
Those were all choices she had the power to make, she added. “But the choice I didn’t get to make about ‘Medicine,’ I now do, and that feels very — I can’t say it’s enriching or comforting, but it’s important,” Potter said.
“It’s like, don’t pretend it didn’t happen,” she continued. “Don’t sweep it under the rug. Why would you? It’s such a beautiful piece of broken glass.”
Additional camera operator: Erynn Patrick.
The post How Grace Potter Lost (and Found) a Solo Album, and a New Life appeared first on New York Times.
