Did you hear that hold music?” Grace Potter spurts as she’s patched through for an interview. “Disney’s flavor-of-the-day hold music Some weird reggae macho music! Wow!”
Grace Potter has been as amped up a vexation of label-defiers as any purveyor of musical hybrids, throughout the course of her career as both a solo singer-songwriter and leader of the industrial strength Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, a mix of old soul, classic rock, blues, jam and a kind of lean folk that suggests her New England roots. She knows when it’s out of the box, and she’s thrilled by what she’s hearing.
These days, Ms. Potter has plenty to be thrilled about. Beyond the obvious success of the band’s self-titled third Hollywood Records release, which spawned the bawdy hit Paris (Oooh La La), she’s been tapped as a VH-1 Diva, broken festival ground with an appearance at Lollapalooza and seen maintream and country radio success with You and Tequila, a yearning duet with arguably that genre’s biggest star Kenny Chesney.
“Lollapalooza made me realize,” Ms. Potter says of the world beyond the obvious Bonnaroos and Outside Lands festivals, “we are capable of crossing over in a way we didn’t realize we could reach people. We didn’t think about that ever.
“We figured people would be like ‘Who’s the hippie chick with this long-haired band?’ But there we were on the same stage as the Kills, Bright Eyes and Coldplay right? And you could see people’s heads, literally, turning; going, ‘What’s that ?’”
Having come of age as an act on the road during the era of festivals, great and small, many jam band-centric or crunchy granola, the Nocturnals always seemed to be a little bit more than the company they were keeping. Still a fierce stripe of musicianship — one that suggests a more workmanlike take on the Allman Brothers’ template of expanding songs to see where they’d go — gave them quarter in a world of Phish and My Morning Jacket.
But Grace with her sky-high heels, false eyelashes and incredible rising hemlines was far too glamorous to be kept in a world of men in earth shoes and scraggly beards. Navigating the more thrusting soul and rock components in the world of beat-driven dance slickness isn’t easy. But Ms. Potter and her merry men (plus one woman, bassist and Ryan Adams’ alum Catherine Popper) can imagine no other way. They build on music, and they take no prisoners — even when they’re unsure of their footing.
“We built up,” Ms. Potter says of Lollapalooza. “We went to this psychedelic blues thing put a total crazy spin on Led Zeppelin, Since I’ve Been Loving You. It was kinda evil and swampy — and we weren’t even sure it would go over, but we knew we wanted to show all the things we do well.
“I figured the Black Keys and the Kills both have blues elements. As long as you throw some strange noises in, you have’em. But we were all shocked, like I said, to see all those heads turning. But that’s the thing: You bring a ballsy, completely unapologetic way of coming right at the music, and people will respond.”
Unapologetic probably best summarizes the road to here. When dissonance struck the band, Ms. Potter went off and made a record — as yet unreleased — with Grammy factory and roots music icon T-Bone Burnett.
“I’m gonna be proactive,” she allows. “We were having our own tribulations, so I figured if T-Bone Burnett wants to work with me, I’m gonna go for it.
“It’s day and night from what (the Nocturnals) do. My voice, everything about me as a person is very different. The emotional moments are very different from who I am as a rocker — and it was me and T-Bone coming together, not just me forging a path. It’s . . . amazing, and one day, it’ll come out . . . but even though it was reported as a band thing, it was never gonna be a Nocturnals record.”
The step outside the circle, though, offered some clarity. Ms. Potter understood better what she wanted and how she wanted to pursue it. That focus has continued to drive the winsome girl with the B-3 and the Flying V.
“I didn’t get into this business to dream small,” she declares unapologetically. “I want to have a hit G.D. record!
“I just had a meeting with a prospective person we might work with on the next one, and I was telling him that. He asked me what the last one sold, and I told him 200,000, and then told him I wanted to double that. That’s what I’m looking for
“You know, there are a lot of different versions of success, and it’s hard keeping track of the charts, the numbers, especially with no record stores, cause you can’t see stacks of stuff going out of them.
“To me, it’s about how many tickets did we sell. It’s simple as that.”
Selling tickets has become an exponential truth-teller for the Nocturnals. Festival veterans from across America, they just headlined their own two-day Grand Point North Festival in her hometown of Burlington, Vt.
“We’re psyched, and we’re freaking out a little about the weather, but this time it’s all on our steam. We’re not trying to be overly ambitious and we’re including a lot of local talent to give back, and give those bands the chance to play and obviously, we hope it can be annual because we like the idea of giving back to where we’re from.
“My dad, who anyone who knows Sparky knows is up for anything, a frisbee match, a late-night poker game, whatever, is helping us. We’ve designed the stage, the backdrops, the layout, picked all the bands. We’re very detail-oriented, trying to use what we’ve learned and also being sensitive to the way people are up there
“It’s over a decade in the dreaming. Even longer really, because when I was 10, my sister and I painted a picture of my big rock festival! There were snakes in the grass with medieval flags and all these lights”
The Grand Point North Festival, last weekend, not only drew an estimated 8,000 people over two days. It also saw the appearance of duet partner Chesney, who proclaimed them, “the best band in the world” before leaving the stage.
And on the Vineyard, where the Nocturnals have been headlining for over half a decade, the band’s drawing power is now requiring two nights to meet the demand at Nectar’s..
“Every time we go back, [that club’s] got a new name,” Ms. Potter says with a laugh. “But I think this time, we decided to really give ourselves the chance to play for the Vineyard, to make it the experience it deserves to be.”
No stranger to the Island, Potter and Co. are hoping to make it an experience offstage as well. “I wanna cook while I’m there. Lately, it’s been seafood, seafood, seafood, so my obsession is to do a for-real lobster thing.
“And we all wanna get out on the water, being on a boat, you know. We don’t know anybody with a boat, but it’s the Vineyard, and I know how Vineyarders are, so if anybody wants to take us out, we’re ready!”
That spirit of adventure that’s carried a very serious young woman to the peak of what rock’n’soul can be remains unfettered.
“There’s such a flood of musicians out there,” she says towards the end. “So many kids think they deserve it because they did a cool version of some song on YouTube, and there’s so much more to this . . . . For us, I know with this next record, we’re going to give it a lot of intentionality, that time and space to really commit to it.
“I want whatever’s next to be a killer follow-up. I don’t wanna be just a continuation. If the last one was an ellipse, this one I want to be a whole new chapter with an exclamation point.”
With that, Potter must go. Soundcheck is waiting, and the sound is important.
“Okay?” she asks, already knowing it is.
Grace Potter and the Nocturnals play at Nectar’s on Sunday and Monday. Tickets are $30 in advance, $35 at the door.
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