Mother Road

Mother Road, the new album from acclaimed singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist, Grace Potter is an audacious and heart-pounding map of the soul. Composed over a two-year span driving back and forth alone across America during the pandemic, on Mother Road, Grace deconstructs her deepest fears and darkest regrets, charting the fallout with brutal honesty and emotional daring. While grappling with demons can often be a rough ride, Grace navigates it all with imagination and unabashed joy.  

Produced by Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Nickel Creek) and recorded at RCA’s famed Studio A in Nashville and Topagadise in Topanga, CA, Mother Road is Grace’s fifth studio LP and her second for Fantasy following 2019’s acclaimed, GRAMMY-nominated, Daylight. Throughout the album’s 10 original tracks, Grace, with contributions from a top-flight band including guitarist Nick Bockrath, bassist Tim Deaux, drummer Matt Musty, pedal steel guitarist Dan Kalisher, and keyboardist Benmont Tench, commands an expansive musical soundscape of soulful rock, roots, funk, country, and R&B. 

Mother Road’s intrigue unfurls with cinematic flair. The driving, irresistibly twangy title-track, an elegy to the mysteries of the open road, is a near flawless album opener. The blistering “Ready Set Go,” ricochets with stinging slide guitar and attitude to burn. Album centerpiece “Little Hitchhiker,” a beautifully detailed story-song co-written by Grace and superstar songwriter Natalie Hemby, poignantly re-imagines the time nine-year-old Grace ran away from home, a profound experience that sparked much of Mother Road’s creative narrative. Further on, the action intensifies. Check out the anti-heroine galloping through “Lady Vagabond,” the happy-go-lucky self-deception that shades “Rose Colored Rearview,” the spirit-purifying “All My Ghosts,” and the album’s wild, theatrical finale, “Masterpiece.” 

Passionate, fearless, and deeply insightful, on Mother Road, Grace Potter stares down the stories we tell ourselves, and proves that puncturing life’s illusions can be both liberating and a hell of a lot of fun.