Grace Potter Built an Album Around a Woman Named Topeka

Grace Potter performing.

The central figure on Trespasser is not Grace Potter. It is a woman called Topeka, invented for the record, whom Potter describes as a middle-aged woman’s crisis moment. Ten songs follow her through places the album’s title suggests she should not be.

The record came out on 21 August through Thirty Tigers, Potter’s seventh, and it is a spiritual sequel to 2023’s Mother Road. Where that album documented her cross-country commute, this one populates it. Eight drives between Topanga Canyon and Vermont over five years supplied the raw material.

Three Studios, Three Different Bands

Eric Valentine produced, as he did on the last record, and the sessions moved with the songs. Grateful Web’s account of the release traces the route: it began at Potter’s home in Topanga with Benmont Tench, formerly of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, on keys.

It continued in Nashville with a set of session players borrowed from other people’s bands — Nick Bockrath of Cage the Elephant, Tim Deaux of Kings of Leon and Matt Musty of Train. It finished in Vermont with Indya Bratton and Ricky Dover Jr. on guitars, Kurtis Keber on bass and Jordan West on drums.

That last group is the significant one. They are her live band, and Potter has pointed out that this is the first time since the Nocturnals that the people on the record are the people on the road. For an artist who has spent a decade working with hired studio musicians, that is a structural change rather than a credit.

The practical consequence shows up on stage rather than on the record. A touring band playing songs it recorded does not have to learn an arrangement second-hand, and it can move away from the recorded version without losing the thread, because it was there when the thread was made. Audiences notice that even when they cannot name it.

Assembling the album across three locations with three different line-ups is the sort of thing that usually produces an incoherent record. What holds it is that Valentine produced all of it, and that Potter’s voice is the constant in every room.

What the Title Argues

Potter has been explicit about the word. “We’ve always been taught that the trespassers are the bad guys,” she said, “but to me it’s not about reckless rebellion — it’s about exploring.” That reframing is the album’s organising idea, and it is why the characters walk into places rather than break into them.

The distinction matters for how the songs behave. A rebellion record needs an antagonist and a grievance. An exploration record only needs somewhere unfamiliar, which is a far more flexible premise and allows ten songs to sit together without arguing the same point.

The Seven Days review is unconvinced by the framing, calling the concept tenuous and more a concept by convenience. That is a fair objection to a loose narrative device. It is also, arguably, describing the reason the record is her most eclectic.

Where the Songs Go

“Main Street U.S.A.” opens on R&B-tinged Southern rock, and in an interview with Glide Magazine Potter connects it to the transformations she has watched in towns like Madrid, New Mexico, which change beyond recognition between tours.

“Ride or Die” is a rollicking rocker about a vagabond who drives her car off a bridge, and “Gasoline” — a doo-wop pastiche — brings the same character back afterwards. That is the clearest evidence the album’s narrative is doing real work rather than decorating a track list.

“Love Me Not” was the first single and reached the Top 5 at Americana radio and the Top 10 at Triple A. Elsewhere “War on the Mountain” channels seventies Heart, and the title track is closer to goth folk than to anything on Americana radio.

“Run Baby Run”, “Lost Cafe”, “The Voice” and “Belong” complete the ten. The sequence keeps alternating between full-band rock and sparser arrangements, which is how an album recorded in three rooms with three different sets of players avoids sounding like three separate EPs stapled together.

The vinyl release makes its own small joke about the theme, with variants named Cell Block Black, Hot Pursuit Orange, Stock Tank Blue and Double Detour Red. Naming your colourways after the consequences of trespassing is a level of commitment to a concept that Seven Days’s “concept by convenience” verdict slightly undersells.

A Peruvian Ocarina and a One-Woman Choir

Two production details in the Glide interview explain the record’s range better than any genre label. On “War on the Mountain”, Potter plays a Peruvian clay ocarina because she wanted a South American influence on the track. It is not a session player’s decision; it is a writer reaching for a specific colour.

The choir credited as the Sambra Viva Angels turns out to be, in her words, a choir she created which is mainly her — inspired by Al Green’s use of chapel vocals. Inventing a fictional choir and crediting it is exactly the kind of joke an album about invented characters should contain.

Seven Days, while sceptical of the concept, is unequivocal about the singing: Potter has never sounded better, and her voice remains the main attraction, as mighty as it is sensual. On an album this scattered, that consistency is what holds it together.

“Not Country, but Country Adjacent”

Potter’s own genre summary is worth quoting because it is unusually precise: she is not country, but she is country adjacent. That describes a real position, occupied by a number of artists who sell tickets to roots audiences without ever operating inside Nashville’s machinery.

Her fuller account of the method is less tidy and more useful. You put all these sounds into the cauldron, she told Glide, mix them up, and that is who I am. An album that runs from stripped-back soul to cosmic country to loud rock is what that sentence produces.

It is the opposite approach to Ashley McBryde’s record earlier this year, which took a single production idea and applied it hard across eleven songs. Both albums were criticised for the same thing — insufficient cohesion — from opposite starting points.

Where She Actually Belongs

The closing song is called “Belong”, and Potter’s explanation of it is the most revealing thing in the interview. Her spiritual connection, she says, has never found its physical place, because her people, from a formative age, are the people on the road.

That is a candid thing for a musician with two homes to say, and it reframes the whole record. An album about trespassing, written by someone with no fixed sense of where she belongs, is not really about entering other people’s spaces. It is about not having one of your own to defend.

She headlines Grand Point North at Burlington’s Waterfront Park in September, on home ground in Vermont. For an artist who has just made a record about belonging nowhere, a festival she founded in her own state is a reasonable place to test the proposition.

There is a neat symmetry in ending the album cycle there. The record was finished in Vermont with the Vermont band, and it will be played in Vermont to an audience that has watched her since the Nocturnals. Whatever Topeka concludes across the ten songs, the person who invented her appears to have worked out where the answer is kept.