Grace Potter
with Devon Gilfillian- Tue Feb 04, 2020
- 7:00 PM / Show: 8:00 PM
- 21+
Tuesday, Feb 4th
Doors 7pm / Show 8pm / 21+
General Admission Advance : $31
General Admission Day Of Show : $35
Daylight Experience VIP Package: $119
• One (1) general admission ticket with early entry to see Grace Potter live
• Access to a private pre-show 3-song performance by Grace Potter
• One (1) limited edition screen printed tour poster, signed by Grace Potter
• One (1) bottle of Grace Potter’s Midnight Gold Maple Syrup, certified Vermont organic
• Merchandise shopping opportunity before doors open to public
Grace Potter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GracePotter/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/gracepotter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/graciepotter/
Youtube – https://www.youtube.com/user/gracepotterofficial
Daylight
In the years that followed the release of her widely acclaimed 2015 album Midnight, Grace Potter
considered never putting out a record again. Having endured the tumult of the breakup of her band and
subsequent divorce— as well as far more joyful events like a new marriage and the birth of her first
child— Potter continued writing on her own, but had no intention of sharing those songs with the world.
“Too many things had happened, and I needed to take a step back,” says the Vermont-born artist.
“There were moments where I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll just go back to painting houses.’”
But by the end of 2017, Potter began to feel the call of the studio and soon started laying down tracks in
the Topanga Canyon home she’d recently settled into with her husband, Midnight producer Eric
Valentine. Unsigned and entirely free of any pressure to appease, Potter slowly carved out the songs
that now make up Daylight: an album that emerges as her most emotionally revealing, musically daring, and exactingly realized body of work to date.
“In the past, I’ve aimed to write songs from a universal perspective; so that anyone who heard my music
could relate, but that actually made it harder for me to take ownership of my own perspective. This new
collection of songs were all written so that I could process – and be accountable for – my own life
experience,” Potter says. “I had just pulled the ripcord on my whole life. It was an incredibly jarring,
private experience. When the dust settled a bit, the last thing I wanted to do was tell the whole world
about it. It was a very gradual process of re-framing music and its purpose in my life. So when I finally
started writing songs again – I did it for me.”
Potter’s seventh full-length and first release for Fantasy Records, Daylight was created in close
collaboration with producer/mixer/engineer Eric Valentine. In constructing the album’s wild collage of
rock-and-roll, blues and soul, Potter tapped into her tightly honed musicianship while harnessing the
untamed energy of her live performance for the very first time. “I had kind of resigned myself to the fact
that I was always going to be better live than in the studio – but Eric was determined to tap into that raw
energy that I have onstage.” she says. “He chased down a few different approaches, ultimately creating
a kind of live music venue setup in his studio, so I could feel the sound reflecting off the walls and
interact with the band instead of just singing into a void.”
Partly recorded in Potter’s garage and living room, Daylight mostly came to life through a series of liveto-
tape sessions at Valentine’s Hollywood studio, Barefoot Recording. Along with capturing the
undeniable vocal power Potter’s previously shown in sharing the stage with The Rolling Stones, Robert
Plant, and Neil Young, the album unfolds with an irresistibly vital sound birthed with the help of guests
like Benmont Tench and Lucius. “Having all these incredible musicians playing live in the room with me
gave the recording an urgency—like, this matters right now,” Potter recalls.
On the album-opener “Love Is Love,” Potter brings that urgency to a breathtaking slow-burner, her
voice shifting from fragile to soaring with understated elegance. The very first piece written for Daylight,
the track finds Potter fully surrendering to unbridled feeling—a process so unsettling, it temporarily put
her off from attempting any further self-examination in song form. “‘Love Is Love’ is so confessional, it
was terrifying. I dove deep into the darkest corners of my personal life.” she says. “After we recorded
the demo, I had no desire to keep on writing because the feelings were still too raw. I wasn’t ready to
dig any deeper.”
Just one song later, Potter proves to have wholly conquered that fear, turning out a full-tilt rocker raging
with pure passion. With her vocals taking on a gravelly intensity, “On My Way” telegraphs unhinged joy
as Potter documents a particularly fraught moment from the past few years when she took a solo drive
across the country. “Once you allow certain feelings in, there’s no turning back.” Freewheeling and
cathartic, “On My Way” builds its frenetic tension in part from a riff that she and Valentine conjured up
on their back porch. “Musically, it’s meant to take you in two directions—there’s a powerful tension
between darkness & light. It’s a theme that plays out a lot on this record, and that riff kinda just says it
all.” Potter notes.
Throughout Daylight, Potter imbues her songs with equal parts aching vulnerability and unapologetic self-possession. A stark piano ballad partly written while Potter was in the process of moving out of her
home, “Release” transmits a quiet sorrow but ultimately finds its resolution in a lyric supplied by cowriter
Mike Busbee (“I hope that someday/The sun will shine again/And you’ll release me too”). On
“Repossession,” meanwhile, Potter sharply contrasts the song’s sleepy rhythm, dreamy guitar tones, and
unearthly harmonies with a brilliant lyrical barb (“And you say/That I threw it all away for nothing/But
the only thing I threw away/Was you”). “We were driving through the Southwest; we stopped at a
pawnshop and bought this busted old guitar with a missing string, dragged it out to these vast sand
dunes and just started playing,” Potter recalls in revealing the song’s origins. “We’d been listening to a
lot of classic country and AM radio on the road trip. These heart-wrenching songs spoke directly to what
we were going through – and even though they were recorded over 50 years ago, it felt like they’d been
reading my diary – so when we sat down to write, ‘Repossession’ just happened. Like it had always been
there, just waiting for someone to show up and claim it.”
While much of Daylight mirrors the emotional chaos of her recent past, the album also channels a
certain soulful wonder on songs like “Every Heartbeat,” an acoustic-guitar-laced serenade for Valentine
and their infant son, Sagan. And on “Desire,” Daylight drifts into an unpredictably playful mood, serving
up a sweetly winking celebration of unabashed lust. “I’ve often cloaked my carnal themes in metaphor.”
Potter notes. “Ultimately that approach lost a lot value for me. I was tired of burying my desires, my
truth, my pain…in euphemisms. I had to start over & rebuild my sense of self, so I went straight to the source with a song that celebrates the fact that we’re all just animals.”
On the title track and finale to Daylight, Potter offers up one of the album’s most galvanizing and
glorious moments: a shape shifting epic that endlessly careens from simmering blues lament to brutally
thunderous rock-and-roll anthem. “It’s a song about the darkest time.” Potter recalls. “We started
composing that song because we wanted to honor the long, difficult process of finding peace. It’s a
musical bookmark; and a reminder that darkness doesn’t last forever.”
For Potter, the making of Daylight marks a return to the unfettered creativity she felt upon first
discovering songwriting. “I really dug back into the roots of my creativity. When I was 12 or 13, I would
sneak away to write songs because I didn’t want anyone to hear me bearing all,” she says. “It was all so
honest, because I had no awareness of how people might perceive me.” At the same time, she made use
of the masterful chops she’s developed over the course of her career, a 15-year run that’s included
playing nearly every major music festival (in addition to launching her own festival, Burlington’s Grand
Point North. “Throughout my career, I’ve always been a bit of a tinkerer; experimenting & exploring all
these different facets of who I am through music,” says Potter. “But this album isn’t an experiment: it’s a
statement.”
As she shares that statement with the world, Potter hopes that Daylight’s fearless honesty might inspire
each listener to embrace their own truth, in all its messy complexity. “This album is about being able to
take complete ownership of your feelings, without any anger or hate or shame. And that can be
absolutely terrifying— but once you get to the other side, it’s exhilarating. It’s the feeling of knowing
that you’re finally home.”
Devon Gilfillian
https://www.devongilfillian.com/
facebook.com/devongmusic/
There is deep soul in the music of Devon Gilfillian—but for the talented Nashville-based singer-songwriter and bandleader, that descriptor goes way beyond a mere genre classification.
Growing up in Philadelphia on a steady diet of R&B, hip-hop, rock, blues, and soul music, Gilfillian gravitated to records that ignited his mind while making his body move. For him, listening to the towering icons of his musician father’s era—Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, The Temptations—was just as formative and exciting as discovering the new sounds of his own generation, and the beats and rhymes made by rising rap stars like Wu-Tang Clan, Kanye West, Notorious B.I.G., and Jay-Z inspired him in new ways. He began to recognize a connective thread in the sounds he loved best: from the golden throwbacks sampled by the hip-hop beat makers to the raw, emotional vocal deliveries of the Motown greats, for Gilfillian the key ingredient seemed to be the “soul”—not simply the genre, but the feeling and vibe.
Following his electrifying 2016 debut EP with upbeat singles like “High” and “Troublemaker” in 2018, Gilfillian signed to Capitol Records and hit the road––performing with the likes of Anderson East, Keith Urban, Gladys Knight, Kaleo, The Fray, Mavis Staples, and more. In early 2019, Gilfillian traveled to Africa to find healing and inspiration before headlining a tour in Scandinavia and opening for Brothers Osborne on their spring tour. His latest single “Get Out and Get It” off of his forthcoming full-length record is available now.