Grace Potter on her love of Pittsburgh, 'Mother Road' album, 'Lady Vagabond' and driving fast

Editor’s note: This story originally posted in October 2023, before Grace Potter’s show scheduled for Nov. 1 that was postponed due to illness.

Grace Potter’s show in Pittsburgh next week is coming at the perfect time.

A break in between tour dates allowed the bluesy rock singer to chill with her family for a few weeks — and create a custom robot helmet for her 5-year-old son’s Halloween costume.

“He puts it on and it will take his audio from his mouth and make a little speaker that makes it sound like he’s talking in robot,” Potter said earlier this month from her farm in Vermont. “I think it’s going to be pretty awesome.”

With Halloween out of the way, Potter will get back on the road, with her tour opening up Wednesday at Stage AE in Pittsburgh, with Rett Madison as the opener.

“Yeah, it’s weird. Once I’m out, I like to just stay out. It allows you to get into the flow,” she said. “It’s not to say that I don’t enjoy being home, but it’s kind of an interruption in what I’d referred to as the thing I’ve been building towards for four years. So once I’m out, I’m really ready to be in the world and making it happen. So I’m already kind of jonesing for getting back out there.”

It will be Potter’s third show in Pennsylvania in about a month — “I just can’t stay away,” she said — after a pair of shows in the eastern part of the state in late September.

On her last tour, she had an off day in Pittsburgh, spending time in Downtown’s Market Square, where she remembered seeing a breakdancer, a performance art piece and more. One of the inclines also provided family entertainment.

“My son is obsessed with trains and trams. So of course we rode the tram up the mountain and walked around,” she said. “To wake up in downtown Pittsburgh was amazing. It was really just such a flourishing, beautiful culture in the Downtown area.”

Potter’s new album, “Mother Road,” came out on Aug. 18, running the gamut from bouncy, Rolling Stones-infused rock to a song straight from a spaghetti western soundtrack. The songs and lyrics purposefully evoke a cinematic experience.

“I mean, from the beginning of writing the songs, I already had the visuals in place. The songs kind of formed around the visuals in my mind more than the other way around,” she said. “So I’m glad that that comes across because it was definitely a labor of love and I think the feeling of closing your eyes when you listen to music, everybody sees a different picture, but I had never taken the time to really try and capture the picture in my mind, and this album is that for me, for sure.”

As she’s grown older — Potter turned 40 in June — her songwriting has changed.

“Yeah, I mean it’s almost, it’s funny. I’m more comfortable in my own skin, but the truth is harder to talk about because some of the things I went through while writing this record were kind of painful and difficult to address,” she said. “And I think I submerged myself in storytelling and revisiting my younger self and alternate realities as a form of disassociation, I think, from the pain that I was really feeling, because when I meet a feeling with swagger and a shiny bright smile, it’s not authentic if I’m not actually feeling that way.

“So if there’s anything I could say about making this record and writing this record was that I became more comfortable in the skin and in my talent in what I truly bring to the table as a singer/songwriter/performer, is that, I can’t lie to a microphone. The microphone feels and hears what I truly am going through, even when I’m trying to mask it with metaphors and characters like Lady Vagabond, no matter how much I want to disassociate, the true and lush and honest peace essence of me is a restless one. And finding comfort in that restlessness through this journey has been, you know, the trip of a lifetime.”

Four cross-country road drives, including three solo trips, helped spark her album. A truly unique playlist ignited the diversity of sound — “People can’t believe what inspired it,” she said as she pulled up the tracks on her phone.

On the playlist? Film noir music from the 1940s, Italian composers Piero Umiliani and Ennio Morricone, Argentine composer Luis Bacalov and American singer Patsy Cline, among others. With her love of 1940s country-and-western songwriting, Potter wanted to tell the story of Lady Vagabond — her imaginary friend when she was 9 years old — without it being a caricature.

“It feels like the closer I could get to the actual essence of the character Lady Vagabond — who I’ve always pictured as this western sort of horseback-riding, motorcycle-riding, train-chasing vigilante — that the closer I could get to the center of her truth, the better it would be if the sound sort of enveloped that character and didn’t seem theatrical,” she said, “but of course, she’s a theatrical character.”

Further inspiration from Italian composers Stelvio Cipriani, Francesco De Masi, Gian Franco Reverberi and Gian Piero Reverberi helped plot the course.

“These are all these composers who started me on the journey of not just loving the films that they made music for, but actually hearing and feeling that music in my own journey,” she said. “And I think it became really authentic for me, and that’s why I tackled that song with such ambitious musical arrangements because it just felt like, well, absolutely it’s gonna be an arrow that we pull back and shoot, and when I sing it, it has to feel true and the lyrics, I actually didn’t have them written down. I was just riffing in the studio and what you hear on that song is actually just what I said out loud in that moment. It’s theatrical, but so am I.”

Potter, who was a film major for two years before giving up college to pursue her musical career, is working to turn “Mother Road” into a movie — “I’ve got the second draft of the script in my hands right now,” she said. “I’m printing it out as we speak.” It’s in development at Ghost Dance Films, which has produced her music videos over the past five years.

“There’s so many different journeys that I want to go on in my life, and revisiting my filmmaking career,” she said, “and considering what I really have been the most passionate about in my music has always been storytelling, and there’s so many different ways to tell stories.”

Driving across the Southwest on Route 66 heavily influenced her album, with the road maintenance (or lack thereof) by one state particularly striking.

“And it actually inspired my film because I thought about how the road might feel about that. You know, like this road that was propped up and made into ‘This is the super highway, this is the American dream in action. Here we all are, let’s band together and create this route that everyone can take to chase down their sunset.’ And what it would feel like to be that prize fighter, that prize horse, that beautiful woman that was painted up beautifully and then suddenly you start to feel the cracks develop and the burden of all of these travelers rolling over you and what it must feel like to know that no one is gonna be there to tend to your wounds,” she said. “And that really is what I think at the core, at the heart of my album, that’s what it’s about, is to feel like, you know, how do you make yourself new again, when maybe you didn’t even wanna be a road to begin with?”

The 2006 Disney/Pixar movie “Cars” touches on a parallel theme, especially with the Route 66 references.

“I think the essence of that movie and what it’s trying to capture is both nostalgia and an acceptance for what cannot be made back into what it was. And I think it’s hard sometimes to look at something so beautiful and so quaint and so honorable in its initial intention and see it transform,” she said. “But I think the city of Pittsburgh also is that, you know? You think about Pittsburgh, it was such, the industry and the way that that city was built up around the industry, that has conformed and shaped the entire town and as industry changed, you watched a rich and vibrant culture and a massive shift and I think the lifestyle and sort of the associations that you have with the city. And it went from steel and coal and different containers and trains and gravel to a vibrant art community and (expletive) Mr. Rogers! And I love every version of it, so there’s definitely some acceptance that I think has to come with that because I think grading against nostalgia or trying to take things backward, it’s only gonna cause heartache.”

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As Potter crisscrossed the nation, traveling between California and Vermont, she also learned some things about herself.

“I’m pretty fearless. I like being alone. I enjoy my own company,” she said. “And also, I go way too fast. I’m a dangerous driver. I mean, I’m not a dangerous driver. I’m a very safe driver But I go dangerously fast when I’m alone, and I think there’s something to that, and I noticed it on the first trip where the music or my thoughts would actually slow me down.

“It was mainly the speed would come when I was not listening to any music. Maybe I was just literally like, I don’t want to think anymore. I just want to drive and, like a race car driver, I want to zoom in on and have tunnel vision for where I’m going and think of absolutely nothing else and it’s such an amazing meditative way to clear out the cobwebs for me and have this sort of laser focus on basically not dying because of how fast I was going,” she adds with a laugh. “I really really think I might have missed my career as a race car driver, but maybe not. Maybe that’s my next journey because I really like driving fast right very much.”

The speedy driving doesn’t happen when her son is a passenger — “I’m going granny 25 (mph) with him in the car,” she said — or when it was her turn to drive the van when their bus broke down on her last tour.

“So for two weeks, me and the band were renting, we were in one van, and my crew was in another van and we drove ourselves everywhere,” she said. “And of course, mama was at the wheel. It was kind of a perfect and auspicious beginning to the tour that the bus failed and I ended up getting to drive the band around for the first couple weeks.”

For this tour, Potter was happy to report she and the band will be back in a bus instead of vans.

“Every once in a while I do enjoy, I like it when things go wrong, so that felt like a sort of an invocation and, you know, that final challenge from the rock gods being like, are you sure you still want to do this? And the answer is (expletive) yeah!” she said with a laugh.