Grace Potter on why mythical, magical solo album with T Bone Burnett was shelved for nearly 18 years: “One of my bandmates said to me, ‘Don’t go all Gwen Stefani on us!’”
In 2008, singer-songwriter Grace Potter and her band at the time, the Nocturnals, were on the way to play a concert in New York’s Central Park, when Potter popped a freshly burned CD into their truck’s dashboard stereo. It was her first time listening to her just-mastered solo album, Medicine, which she’d recorded over the course of two thrilling weeks at Los Angeles’s Village Studios with legendary producer T Bone Burnett and his wrecking crew of luminaries that included drummer Jim Keltner and guitarist Marc Ribot. And, as she tells Gold Derby, she was “excited to start that era of my life where I, as the main songwriter in my band, was going to be able to get seen and understood as an artist, in and of my own creative forces.”
But Potter had only heard Medicine “exactly one time,” when, as she remembers with crystal clarity, her manager came running up to her truck window after the Central Park gig and delivered some bad, baffling news: the powers-that-be at her label, Hollywood Records, had decided to shelve the album, indefinitely and probably permanently. “And that's the only [CD] copy that I had,” she says. “I didn't hear it again until this past May.”
Potter was understandably “devastated,” but she was also determined to salvage the situation and keep this passion project alive. “The first thing I thought of was T Bone. I wanted to call T Bone and just ask him: ‘What can we do? There must be something we can do! We gotta fix this! Who do we have to talk to? Whose ass didn’t I kiss?’ I'd never had such a hard-slammed door in my face for something that was so good,” she recalls incredulously. “I'll never forget, [the label] said, ‘We're not putting it on the back burner. We're putting on the middle burner.’ But to me, that was a gentle way of saying, ‘This may never come out.’ … And as it continued to mount up and snowball into this mystery, there was very little conversation about putting it out. It was more like, ‘Well, that'll be there for your archives someday.’”
But now, “someday” has arrived. Medicine is finally getting a proper release — on Hollywood Records — which Potter says is “more about doing right by my fans who've known about it forever.” But the mythical lost album also provides a fascinating glimpse into her wide-ranging artistry, and the story behind its nearly two-decade delay provides such a fascinating glimpse into the music-industry machinations of the aughts that Medicine, ironically, is generating much more buzz now that it likely would have it if had come out as planned. “This press tour has been insane! I've never done so much press. I've never had so much interest. I think there's something kind of Indiana Jonesy about it,” Potter chuckles.
Burnett was fresh off producing two Album of the Year Grammy winners, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s Raising Sand, when he reached out to the then-rising rock ingénue (after being impressed by a video of her singing a cappella) and took her under his wing. That should have made the entire Medicine project a no-brainer, a slam-dunk, basically a record company marketing department’s dream. But this was an era when traditional, terrestrial radio airplay was still crucial when it came to breaking major-label acts, and Hollywood Records, after winning a “big bidding war” to sign Potter, was still struggling to break the young roots-rocker, who sarcastically yet proudly describes herself as “a relatively unmarketable human being.”
“Remember, this was a paradigm structure where women in music were a rarity, if anything, as far as getting spins on the radio,” Potter points out. “Yes, we had a few pop stars like Britney [Spears], Christina Aguilera. We had Beyoncé coming out from behind the veil of Destiny's Child. Taylor Swift was just a little dumpling; she was not the ‘Taylor Swift’ we know now. Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella’ hadn't come out yet. So, this was all really in the space of: ‘Do you want to stay as an Americana act that's always maybe third-to-the-top of the bill at a festival, at best? Or do you want to rock it into the stratosphere?’ … And unless I was going to go be a full-blown country artist, which was the other option for radio, there's just only so many compartments you can put things in. … And they did not know what compartment [Medicine] went in.
“There had been a huge investment in my ‘brand’ and in building out this ‘rock ’n’ roll goddess’ who is taking radio by storm,” Potter continues. “And somewhere in the midst of making the T Bone record, as a couple of the songs were trickling out, there were, unbeknownst to me, rumblings from the A&R and radio people [at Hollywood Records] that this was not going to land at iHeartRadio the way that they really were gunning for. They wanted a smash hit — like, break every ceiling there is and get this rock ’n’ roll goddess to the top of the pile.”
And so, Potter’s A&R rep “stepped in and really put a kibosh on the T Bone record, because there was a marketing goal, a radio goal, TV goals, and that this record wasn't going to get us there. It would be like throwing reishi mushroom powder into the coke den and hoping that somebody wants it. It didn't gel for her, and therefore she fought tooth and nail to make sure that no one else would let it go anywhere.”
That A&R rep then dispatched Potter back to the studio — this time with the Nocturnals in tow — to rework seven Medicine songs with more hard-charging, guitar-heavy vibe with a different producer, Mark Batson. “It wasn't like the record company was trying to be harsh; it came with the good news that, ‘Hey, now you get to make this record all over again, with your band! Isn't that great?’” Potter laughs. “But it was a significant investment for the record company to throw down for a T Bone Burnett record, and then throw down for a whole follow-up of some of the same songs.”
However, Potter now better understands that label employee’s agenda, because of “the undeniable result” of the album that came out instead, 2010’s Grace Potter & the Nocturnals. One of Medicine’s rerecorded tracks, “Paris (Ooh La La),” ended up on the band’s self-titled third album and became Potter’s elusive smash hit — what she describes as her previously “uncaught tornado” and the “catalyst for what we were still chasing. … I think culturally people know it; even if they don't know it's me, they know that song. I mean, we were opening for the Black Crowes and we were at a strip club, and it came on three times in one night! That's a roundly effective song!”
Potter elaborates, “‘Paris’ was a very specific song. When I wrote that song, I was so determined for that one to be the hit, because I knew it was my ‘Kinks song.’ I got that flying V [guitar], and when I bought it, I was like, ‘I need to write a song that earns me the right to hold this motherf--king guitar. This is a cool-ass guitar, but it could be just as easily just a corny, dumb-looking thing, if I don't play it like I f--king mean it.’”
Potter had actually already unsuccessfully recorded “Paris” four times before giving it a go with Burnett, who wanted to record the entire song in French — which certainly would not have helped Potter’s chances at U.S. radio. Eventually she and Burnett recorded it in English, but she says, “I think the effectivity of that [version] on the T Bone record is very different. It is in a chamber all of its own, and I think it's a beautiful rendering of that song, but I think if I could pinpoint one song that was the reason why we needed to go back into the studio, it was probably ‘Paris.’”
At the time of Medicine’s recording, there was already some “unraveling within the band.” (The Nocturnals eventually split in 2015, around the same time that Potter divorced her husband, Nocturnals drummer Matt Burr — although she stresses that Burr, a Keltner fan, was, unlike some of her other bandmates, supportive of the Medicine project.) So, Potter was “really, really ready for a break from having to validate males and their egos everywhere I went.” She knew working with someone like Burnett was a “really wonderful opportunity to stake my claim,” “create something that I could really identify as my own thing,” and “show the world, at a time when I was still evolving as an artist, that I have many boxes — and I like all of them.” However, she admits that she still felt “conflicted” and “ashamed” when she accepted Burnett’s once-in-a-lifetime offer.
“One of my bandmates said to me, ‘Don't go all Gwen Stefani on us!’ — basically meaning, ‘We're deigning to make music with you and even play your songs, and you should probably be grateful for that. You’re lucky to have us, so why would you break off and go do your own thing?’” Potter reveals ruefully. “I think I was a young woman who felt like, ‘Shut up. You're lucky to be here. Just take what you can get.’ It's natural for me to want to validate people; it comes from just years and years of being around insecure people and being an empath, where you recognize that they're insecure, so you prop them up. And then one thing leads to another, and you're in a really dangerously codependent relationship with someone who absolutely needs you to validate them. And all those things were definitely happening with specific members of my band that I didn't see the forest from the trees. But this was a chance to just peek out like a bird coming out of the top of the forest with the T Bone record — just looking out at the horizon that was possible. And it caused a lot of pause. Ultimately, because of the unstoppable force of any creative person who has these dreams, I was going to do it. But I felt bad about it. … And it did not go over well.”
Potter never forgot about Medicine, and once she officially went solo with her Midnight album in 2015, she resumed her mission to get it released. “I always wondered what would've happened if it had come out, maybe as a tandem record or as double record [with Grace Potter & the Nocturnals] — how it would've been received. Maybe it would've just been too much information. Maybe it would've all just slid under the rug and been forgotten, or it would've diluted the songs to have two options for which one to listen to. This is all way before Swiftie and her re-records,” she notes. “But I’d thought about the lost opportunity there, and that if I was going to extricate myself from a manipulative situation with my band, that I wanted to do it with a force for good and a story that is true. I never was able to tell the whole truth, because this record wasn't out, so the full picture wasn't there. [That’s why] people didn't quite understand what that Midnight record was about. … I was really realizing that what I have to offer the world is much more than just shutting up and singing and being grateful for the people around me. I think the gratitude is always there, because it comes through in what I'm making, but to withhold something is to actually lose out on the generosity of the universe. So, why not just take this beautiful thing out of the crypt and share it? … And I actually knew that any time I wanted to pick this one up and put it out into the world, it was going to fit into the paradigm of my catalog.”
And now that Potter has revisited Medicine for the first time since that disappointing day in Central Park, so many specific memories of its creation have come flooding back. She chucklingly recalls getting pulled over by a cop for an illegal left turn in front of Village Studios on the album’s first day of recording (the studio’s owner helped her talk her way out of getting a ticket); or how Keltner had a hard-carved wooden vitamin tower that looked “like something from Lord of the Rings”; or how the “haunting” session for the album’s opening track, “Before the Sky Falls,” was organized “like a Quaker ceremony.” She also lights up remembering how any nervousness she might have felt about inserting herself into Burnett’s illustrious boys’ club immediately dissipated once she started jamming in the studio and the musicians’ “eyes got big and their reaction was like, ‘This bitch can play!’”
“I felt like I was the assistant director to Ridley Scott — at 22, 23 years old, I was getting access to someone with so much knowledge and such a deep well of patience and understanding for every different person's form of expression,” Potter marvels, as she reflects on the Burnett collaboration. “It was like somebody had opened a release valve that I had never felt before in the studio. Making records with my band had felt like brain surgery, and now suddenly I'm in here and it feels like I'm with a laughing monk at a mud spa in Palm Springs on peyote. It was just perfect. It was just a perfect experience for me of acceptance and willingness and wonder. And they were bringing curiosity to the table; they weren't just bringing the big-d***-swinging and ‘we know what we're doing’ thing. They didn't have that. I don't think T Bone would hire people that bring that kind of energy into the studio, anyways. It was a reframing of my whole understanding of how professional recording artists can behave in the studio, because up until that point, it had just been me and the pile of puppies that I grew up with.”
Now Potter, who at age 41 is remarried (to record producer Eric Valentine) and has a 7-year-old son, listens to Medicine and muses, “I've had so much life under me. I hear the innocence in my voice. I hear myself listening to the other musicians. I hear myself taking the notes from T Bone about just restraint — which I think was a really interesting note, coming from somebody who is as cosmic as he is, that leaving space and not always going for the big, howling note is a really great expression of musicality. I learned that, and I have taken it with me. … There's a delicacy to this record that I think has definitely been banged out of me a bit. I hear some really intricate and very intentional choices being made. I think the efficacy of the record is really a tonic for anybody who heard the eponymous record and was like, ‘This is a little too hard-hitting.’ I was banging it home with the Batson record, and the T Bone record is just such a wonderful characterization of these songs in such a different form. I think it'll appeal to a really different audience, too.”
As for the record’s appeal, it’ll still be eligible at next year’s Grammy Awards despite its postponed release — so perhaps Burnett will add another golden statuette to his mantel, and Potter, who was nominated for two Grammys in 2020, will win one for Medicine. “Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised, the way my career has gone,” she laughs. “The most random sh-t that I do is the stuff that keeps the chaos in the creative force acknowledging me. The universe knows I'm there. It's winking at me so hard. What a little trickster it is.”