Grace Potter

With her new album Trespasser, Grace Potter introduces a beautifully unruly cast of characters who step into forbidden spaces with absolute abandon. A spiritual sequel to 2023’s Mother Road, the four-time Grammy nominee’s seventh studio album continues a kaleidoscopic storyline inspired by her life between Topanga Canyon, California, and her family farm in Vermont. While Mother Road was born from a need for solace amid emotional freefall, Trespasser finds Potter firmly anchored in her singular vision. Her career has included sharing stages with the Rolling Stones and Robert Plant, and earning praise from Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt.

“I believe we need to challenge the way we’ve been told to navigate our lives, because so many of the boundaries we’ve set up aren’t working; we’re not living authentically,” says Potter. “I respect boundaries when they’re clear and meaningful, but when they feel arbitrary or put in place without question, I think we need to push against them. So many of those fences exist in our own minds—but when you step beyond them, it completely shifts your perspective. It can open everything up, like suddenly seeing the world in Technicolor.”

The album includes “Run Baby Run,” a dramatic, high-energy song about self-preservation. Potter says it grew from a moment when she had to have a serious conversation and her instinct was to run. She questioned why she wanted to flee when things got heavy, and the song became a love song about a woman escaping an abusive relationship. Its sound began as “full ’80s, like if Tina Turner had ZZ Top as her backing band,” before the band pulled it back to a sound that felt honest.

Potter conceived Trespasser as a dimension-hopping road saga, weaving together “these fables and storylines that have been whooshing around my soul for a very long time.” Its rotating cast of drifters centers on Topeka, a nomad who drives off a bridge in “Ride Or Die” and is resurrected in “Gasoline.” The album’s misfits also include the ghost of a café delivery boy and the diner owner who killed him. On “War On The Mountain,” the story becomes a mythic psychodrama about making peace with the selves you were told to exile.

“From a young age, I made up characters to take me places I didn’t feel I had permission to go on my own,” Potter says. “I invented all these otherworldly stories because it was easier than saying, ‘This is who I want to be and what I want to do.’ But now I realize I’m the permission slip I was always looking for.”

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