Out of the darkness
Grace Potter shines ‘Daylight’ on her next chapter
Grace Potter thought she might be done with the music industry. A singer who could move from Robert Plant’s yowl to Norah Jones’ coo, a writer of Homeric rock and lonesome, tender nocturnes, Potter had life crash down on her. She divorced, her band broke up, the music industry kept trying to force her in a small, simple box. Shortly after the pummeling, Potter started writing the song “Release” and her now husband, producer Eric Valentine, suggested she hook up with songwriting ace Mike Busbee to finish it.
Busbee, who passed away in 2019, had become a man with a Midas touch (he worked on hits for Lady Antebellum, Kelly Clarkson, Pink and more). A talent with stars knocking at his door, he told Potter he had hesitations about working with a pregnant woman with no record company and no plans to put out new music or go on tour.
“His level of honesty really shook my cage,” Potter said ahead of a sold-out House of Blues show tonight. “I said, ‘(expletive) you! There is no way that this is the end of the line for me. I am not out to pasture. This is not how this (expletive) goes down.’ And I proved this with ‘Release,’ a really incredible piece of music that came from the fire inside of me.”
“Release,” which Busbee eventually did work on with Potter, became part of “Daylight,” the singer’s new LP for Fantasy Records. The song — a piano ballad that would suit Adele or Aretha Franklin — boils over with anger and forgiveness all at once. It’s an emotional purge that sits at the middle of an album of catharsis after catharsis.
Don’t assume that means ballad piled upon ballad. Like she has in the past, Potter finds emotional ablution in raging rock ’n’ roll (“On My Way” seethes like the Stone’s “Gimme Shelter”) and slinky r&b (“Desire” would work as a Stax single or neo soul gem). After the psychic, sonic workout, Potter closes with the title track, a rogue wave of such intensity it threats to drown every sweet melody and sly groove on the LP.
“I really wanted ‘Daylight’ to be the track that made a statement that the rest of the music couldn’t, because the rest of the music was so pure and so therapeutic and so earnest,” Potter said. “‘Daylight’ was that bombastic energy that was missing, not just from the record, but from my life. It was the last song I wrote with Eric and, I’m not going to lie, psychedelics were involved.”
The song begins with a wall of feedback, distorted guitars and a clatter of drums, before resolving into Potter moaning, “Ooooooh,
Lord, it’s been a long, long time/I’ve been lost and found and lost again so many times/I can’t remember if I ever knew my way at all.” Somehow only four and a half minutes, the album closer winds around different peaks and valleys like a Led Zeppelin epic.
“The momentum of that song is a really wonderful reflection of my personality,” Potter said. “You are never going to take the thrashing, headbanger out of me. Not because I’m clinging to it, or that’s how I identify based on my brand, or blah blah blah. No, no, no, I just can’t help myself. I’m a complete Tasmanian devil.”
While much of the album “Daylight” comes off as (relatively) mellow folk-country-soul, Potter’s stage show remains a mix of ballads and blazing, screaming rock. A new mother and wife, a hippie and gardener toting a toddler on the road, she uses the title track to remind the world (and all those record execs and radio programmers) that she contains multitudes.
“‘Daylight’ is the other end of the spectrum from the song ‘Release’ and making the two so different was very much intentional,” she said. “(With this album) I decided I would rather be honest and open and invite the truth in. Not only so it can clear the air for me, but so I can set my intentions for the future and decide what kind of a songwriter I want to be and that’s someone who can write both these songs.”