Growing up, Grace Potter always had a strong taste for celebrity. She remembers wishing she’d some day just morph into Ariel, of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. When it started to look as if coronation was out of the question, she embarked on another path to fame, joining up with some college buddies to form the band Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.

Turns out she and the ginger-haired princess did have something in common: a singing voice that threatened to make even the most unsuspecting observer fall instantly in love. It’s even attracted the attention of the company to whose throne she once aspired. Next on her busy agenda is a project to record the theme song for an upcoming Disney fairy tale film.

What with a national concert tour, a nod from Rolling Stone (which named Grace Potter and the Nocturnals one of the best new bands of 2010), and a coveted spot on the soundtrack for the latest Disney princess flick, it seems that Ms. Potter has taken a pretty good crack at that fame for which she long hoped.

“I have always had a death wish for fame,” joked the sandy-haired rocker in a rare quiet moment stolen backstage before her Friday night show at Nectar’s nightclub. “When this all started, I wanted that.”

Ms. Potter and the Nocturnals have been together now eight years and have really taken off only in the past year or so. But for that, she’s grateful.

“It’s different when a band has an overnight success,” she said. “They meet in college, they make a tape, and then someone finds it and all of a sudden it’s all over the Internet. That didn’t happen for us. So instead we’ve had this opportunity to really bathe ourselves in the experience, and every year to grow and change.”

Luckily, Ms. Potter and her band haven’t let the success of their self-titled album — their first since inking a record deal with Hollywood Records — let them forget their roots. They’ve outgrown the Nectar’s in Burlington, Vt., where owner Christopher Walsh said the band was noticed by their record company during a club residency. But the Martha’s Vineyard Airport Nectar’s is big enough to hold the crowds they draw, and they’re happy to have an excuse to come back.

On Friday night, an anxious crowd finally welcomed the Nocturnals on stage at a little after 11 p.m. In short order, Ms. Potter erupted next to her bandmates, clad in a fiery red minidress and sky-high platforms sandals, to perform a version of the aptly-chosen song Hot Summer Night, from the new album. While the preshow Grace Potter seemed to resemble the polite but jokey girl-next-door, her on stage alter-ego was explosive; laughing, cursing and fiercely belting out one energetic song after another.

Some say the new music has taken the band away from their roots, but Ms. Potter said the album actually evokes the same feelings that came through in their debut work. “If you listen to some of the early stuff, at the core of it is always this soulful, feisty attitude that I kind of forgot about in the middle there, when I was trying to be taken seriously as a songwriter,” she said in the preshow interview. “Now I realize that femininity, and sort of the sexiness and the raunchiness that is Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, is at its best when we’re completely not self-aware. Like when we completely let go of all that stuff and just embrace the quirky tidbits.”

In accepting who they are, imperfections and all, Ms. Potter said the band has become the kind of musicians they want to be. “If you spend any time with us backstage here, you’ll know. I mean, we’re loud, we’re boisterous, we’re gregarious. We’re kind of off-color, slightly offensive people. And the music has finally kind of embraced that piece,” she said.

The band is now made up of three of the founding members; Ms. Potter, drummer Matt Burr, and guitarist Scott Tournet. Newer to the scene are guitarist Benny Yurco and bassist Catherine Popper. But the three originals met as students at St. Lawrence University in upstate New York, and Ms. Potter remembers the early days, long before the record labels came knocking, as they began to tour as a band.

“Matt was basically the manager of the band. He actually made up like a pseudonym for himself so that people wouldn’t think that the drummer was booking us,” she said, laughing. Using that fake name, he booked their first Island show, back when Nectar’s was the Hot Tin Roof.

Mr. Burr became the manager, booking agent and record company all rolled into one. “We’ve done a lot of that do-it-yourself touring, and that was all because of Matt. Because he really captured the sense of getting out on the road and realizing that touring is the only way a band can really succeed. You have to spread the word,” said Ms. Potter. “If we hadn’t grown so quickly and worked so hard, we just would have fallen apart like every other band.”

Instead, they’re scaling the Billboard charts. And according to Ms. Potter, they’re enjoying the success without sacrificing their integrity or the quality of their music. After a period of skepticism, just after record companies began showing interest, she realized that wasn’t necessary. They don’t have to be the rebellious, “freak-out” rock stars who smash guitars and inspire mayhem, nor do they have to write the “corniest, cheesiest, brightest, shiniest pop song in the world.” They just fall somewhere in between.

“Really when you look at those two extremes, you get Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, right in the middle. We will not write a shiny, happy, cute pop song, but we also won’t have the sort of cantankerous evil drone jams for 45 minutes either. But we’ve done both. Like I’ve written the cute pop song, and the band has taken it really far out and we’ve gotten really deep and dark and murky. The crowd doesn’t even know what to do with us at the end of the night,” said Ms. Potter. And that’s just how she likes it. “I feel like eight years later, we’ve finally figured out something in the middle that feels comfortable.”