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Grace Potter has a “new” T Bone Burnett-produced release coming out, “Medicine,” and it’s something that her label put out a press release announcing and she even did interviews touting… in the late 2000s. Fans didn’t forget this would-have-been, should-have-been album from early in her recording career, but it seemed destined to remain in the land of lore, until now. Hollywood Records, her former label, will finally issue the lost album May 30, and a first single, “Before the Sky Falls,” arrives as a teaser today.
Potter told Variety the story of how the project came to be — or, for 18 years, not to be — amid shooting a video for the title track at her California home, admitting that it might set some kind of record for time elapsed between the recording of a song and its music video.
“This whole thing is basically just a Richard Linklater movie, you know,” she laughs, likening it to one of the filmmaker’s projects that is filmed over a period of many years. “Or I feel like it’s like putting an inscription in a yearbook for somebody you haven’t seen in, I don’t know, 17, 18 years, and they come to you and they’re like, ‘Look at this book. Can you finally write me like a little note so I can have something to remember you by?’ It feels very good to reinscribe it with, like, a nice calligraphy pen.”
She has been in contact with Burnett about the resurrection of the project. “I was emailing with T Bone about it and he was saying, ‘It just feels so timeless. It almost feels more timely now than it did then.’ And when I hear the music now, it really just stands up to all of the things I’ve always done. I’ve always aimed to be timeless, but I’ve grown more immature over the years, so this brings back some of that maturity, I think.”
It was conceived as a solo album for Potter, away from her band at the time, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Burnett assembled a team of studio players that includes several of the standbys he still uses in the studio today: “I just really loved the experience of being in the studio with T Bone and Mark Ribot and Dennis Crouch and Keefus Ciancia and, I mean, Jim fucking Keltner.” In an interview she did at the time, when the album was completed and still scheduled to come out, she characterized it as “more of a storyteller, kind of tribal, Motown, voodoo thing. It’s really trancey, but also has lots of vocals and plenty of songwriting.” She stands by that description today. But that nutshell may go some way toward explaining why it didn’t come out: Potter was seen by her label and management as more of a straight-ahead rocker in a time when rock ‘n’ roll was seen as on the wane and needing a popular savior, and the left turn that “Medicine” represented was seen as getting in the way of that forward momentum.
“I was stoked on this record. I thought this record was coming out,” she affirms. “And I had no idea until I got the news from my old manager and he was just like, ‘Yeah, so we’re gonna put pause on that record. We’re gonna go re-record a bunch of these songs with a different producer.’ That was a complete gut punch to me — mostly because of how fun it was to make. … It just all felt like the adults were weighing in, and I wasn’t blaming them for seeing that I wasn’t an adult. And I think they saw my charisma and my sexuality and my youthful energy as something that would go away — and they were wrong. It’s still there. But at the time, there was a lot of gauging and shaping and sort of forming the brand.”
She ended up re-recording about two-thirds of the abandoned songs from the “Medicine” sessions for her next album, a group effort titled “Grace Potter and the Nocturnals,” released in 2010. With Mark Batson producing, that record could hardly have sounded more different from the Burnett-helmed project that went into the vault. Potter didn’t chafe for long at the idea of redoing the record, though, wanting to prove herself adaptable, and also feeling loyal to her band, which was regrouping with some new members (and included her then-partner as drummer).
“It was strange to change courses in midstream, especially because at that moment I think I thought that I could do stuff on my own and I could be independent from the band while also harboring joy and appreciation and loyalty for the band as well. But it just didn’t all gel at the same time,” Potter says. “And the record company was very aware of that and very aware of how committed I was to trying to be as a team player. So they knew I would take it better than a lot of artists who would probably freak out and just run away. But I always like a new challenge, too,” she notes, “and suddenly I had the opportunity to re-record the songs — it was a strange time.”
She thinks back on how she felt beholden to “all of that loyalty and that feeling of ‘We gotta keep this thread. We’ve got a good thing going with the touring band.’ But what’s wrong with a little T Bone on the side? Exploring polyamorous musical natures? But that’s not how it panned out. So, you know, I don’t blame anybody. I think there were a lot of good intentions, both from the adults and from the children and from the wild, cosmic thinkers in the group. It wasn’t the moment, for some people, but I still wonder what life would be like if I had put out that record then.”
It represents fan servicing as well as a bit of personal vindication and just sheer enjoyment to have it come out now. “I think for me, this really was about the fans, to be totally honest,” Potter says. “It’s that question that always comes up like six, seven times a year, from some random fan who impresses me with their knowledge of my backstory or my earliest songs, or they bought a CD from me out of the back of my car in 2003 — those are the folks that I really felt like they deserve this. And in the process of looking through my history over the course of ‘Mother Road’ [her 2023 album], I was doing some deep delving into my past and just trying to understand what parts of it matter, and this was a very formative moment in my life. Working with T Bone was one of my favorite experiences ever. And other than meeting Eric Valentine, it was the first time I wasn’t afraid of the studio. It didn’t feel like this big, bad wolf; it was just a delight from top to bottom. I just didn’t know how easy it could be. It was me and a producer who really had every right to claim that terrain and say, ‘This is our space. This is not a manipulation; this is not a shaping or a sculpture class of other people weighing in on it. This is you and me and your dreams. Let’s do it.’ So there’s something really pure about that.”
Her former label was gung-ho on pulling the album out of the vault once she brought it up in a modern context. “it was so fun going back to Hollywood Records, like so many of the same folks there, which is just a really encouraging thing to go back to a label after 10 years of not seeing anybody and almost the entire staff that I remember are there. … I think everybody universally across the board was just like, ‘Finally, motherfucker.’ And it is definitely a prize. I think it’s a testament to T Bone and his timelessness, but it’s also a testament to how patient people can be in the industry.”
“The vinyl version is coming out with three tracks per side. So it’s gonna be loaded with the fidelity that would be expected for a T Bone Burnett production, but also because it deserves that. It deserves to feel like something that’s treasure that’s been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for a long time.”
She’s treating it like a proper new release, not an archival one, she says. “I’ve always got a new idea, and I’m not gonna lie — I have two films and three more albums that I’ve got under my belt that I’ve been working on also in the midst of all this. But what better way to, I think, truly hand over and hand back something that should have belonged to the universe back then, and see it arrive timelessly, exactly as it occurred to begin with.
“It’s as if we wandered into an old vintage motel and we just decided to stay for a few months, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll write my next record here.’ This record feels like wandering into an old motel that never got refurbished and is just still the same owners and still the same feeling. Even the same record label, which is awesome. It’s really fun to wander back over to Disney and be like, wow — this is all seeming like the best version of a ‘Groundhog Day’ moment that I could possibly have in my career. Very surreal.”
Potter will release four preview tracks from the album before its May release. “Medicine” is the one she’s shooting the video for, but first out of the date now is “Before the Sky Falls,” one of four tracks from the album that never got remade.
She fondly recalls writing it with David Poe, who as a New Yorker was chanelling some leftover apocalyptic feelings about 9/11 at the time. “All the verses are quite doom and gloom,” she notes, and then “all of the choruses are like, ‘But what if we could just find love in the midst of all this? Wouldn’t that be rad? Wouldn’t it be salvation? Wouldn’t it be the true existing in the micro as opposed to the macro of fear and loathing and disdain, and just letting yourself be consumed by the bigness of a remarkable shift in reality?’ Something we’re all going through right now.”
Potter is set to open for Chris Stapleton for select dates this summer, including two nights at Madison Square Garden, before resuming headlining dates later in the year.
