Kenny Chesney Music

Potter is equally excited to be bringing her band to New England for a slew of shows starting August 11 with the Newport Sunset Music Series in Rhode Island. Not to mention their very own Grand North Point festival happening August 13 and 14 in her hometown of Burlington, Vermont. Among those joining the band will be Fitz & The Tantrums, The Wood Brothers and Taj Mahal, an artist she credits with showing the band “what it takes to be in a rock n’ roll band and tour and not go insane and all that stuff”.

With all this in mind, we talked with Potter prior to her New England shows about the band’s success, how they keep the shows fresh and when they’ll be getting back in the studio.

Boston Music Spotlight (BMS): Grace Potter and the Nocturnals have been around for a little while now but it seemed you really exploded last year with the release of your self-titled album. When did you realize GPN was at a new level?

Grace Potter (GP) : I think it was a couple of summers ago when we got back from Bonnaroo in 2009. I think there was a real energy in the sense that this wasn’t stopping anytime soon. We took it with us into the studio. We really had this electrified sensibility after that summer tour in 2009 where we were like, this is real, this is happening and people are really responding and all of a sudden our songs just took on a whole new energy and not to say we were dead in the water before that but when winter passes and you don’t tour a lot and people start wondering, “whatever happened to that band?”, you know, it’s kind of freaky. So we got back out in the summer and really just ran with it and obviously this record has been a huge uplifting process for us because so many more people have heard it now than had ever heard it before and that is the greatest thing, You can’t cook that up. You can’t fake that. It just happens. BMS: And that’s actually how I came to know about you guys. A friend of mine took me to the show at the House of Blues in Boston and I have to tell you, the show was amazing and the album is by far one of the best I’ve heard in a long time from start to finish. It’s so good.  When you were writing and recording the songs was there a moment when you realized that this selection of songs was going to be so special?