Name: One On One with Grace Potter
Uploaded: 2019-12-11
Duration: 14 min 33 s
Description: Grace Potter discusses her career, marriage, and growth as an artist.

[ MUSIC ] Thank you, my love. That was incredible. Yeah, I don't know what to do after that. [ LAUGH ] We were just watching backstage. Are we just gonna public- cry the whole time? Yeah, we'll do our best to keep it together, no promises. So as you all just heard, Grace's has just released an album. And it just comes out such an interesting point in your career. You've been releasing music sort of non stop since You were not long out of your teens. Yes actually 19 I think okay, so I'm gonna go through it so you your original band formed and you're still in college. This is Grayson the nocturnals you guys released four albums .>> Yes You were doing these collaborations. You heard the mention of the with the work with Kenny Chesney Yes. And you put out a solo record midnight in 2015 and then nothing. Everything stopped. For almost five years and you said that during that period you actually thought that maybe your career as a professional musician had kind of run its course. Yeah. So take us back to to that, that and tell us what changed your mind and gave us this new album. I, I was mad at music. I didn't know who to blame so I thought wouldn't it be easy to just say. This is something I have done my whole life. It's something that I learnt to do. I didn't learned I just had it. And, do I need a microphone, okay. All right. Can you here me now? Hey, I had growing up knowing how to make music and knowing to remote But I wasn't at peace with why music had chosen me. And then as a teenager I got swept up in it and my band and there's all these people that wanted to come see me and I was a very confused kind of outlier in the music industry. And I just though For all the success, there's also a lot of pain that comes with fame, and even just a little bit cuz I'm really not that famous, nobody here knows who I am. [ LAUGH ] Couple of people maybe, but Show hands. It's the people who asked me to come here. [ APPLAUSE ] And I think- Maybe more peopel than you think. [ LAUGH ] The important thing to realize is that as a young person you don't know Who you want to be and I have so much more of an understanding of who I am now. And I think the more I got to know myself the more I wondered if music was actually my calling or if it was just something that I was really good at that got me attention. So this time off was really important for me to understand because so many people have been hurt. I fell in love with my record producer making a record that was supposed to be a record with my band. And it was all all males except myself and I found myself in this position of wanting to have my like, Cindy Lauper, Annie Lennox, Pointer Sisters, Donna Summer dance record and I was like right guys. This is gonna be great. And they were just like no that's It's not what we're doing here. So that's why that record became a solo record. And through the process, my producer was someone who I wasn't looking to fall in love with but I did. So it felt like a good time to take a break. The band had broken up. My marriage had fallen apart. I was married to my drummer. I met him when I was in my teens and, so there was a lot of growth that happened in that process. And what made you think you'd gone through this process you had gone solo, you had gotten divorced. You've gotten remarried, you had a baby. What made you think okay, now we've been through that. It's It's time for a new album. I didn't I was just broke. That is a great answer. No, I mean, there's a lot more. But, but there is a reality. I wanted to explore the possibility that I could take another career and I took, House painting very seriously when I was a young kid, cuz it paid for my first two records. So before I was a signed artist, I paid for all my albums making houses look beautiful. So I thought I could do that again and make the same amount of money. And it turns out that's not how it works. Yeah, no, that does not sound like how it work. [ LAUGH ] You have also said that this, you've compared this new album to a journal and said it's your most personal, and you're writing songs about these things, about some joyful times in your life but also some painful times. So what it's like to take those like most intimate moments and put them out there where all of us can listen to them and pick over them? I still kinda can't believe that I've done that. And it's hard to express ideas that you have inside your head. I think if anyone's ever written down that idea that you think is so brilliant on a napkin at a restaurant or whatever it is And then suddenly someone has taken that sketch or that thing that you wrote in there, like taking it super seriously like there's a board of people that they're like, Okay, so we're going with the blue shoes on. [ LAUGH ] And you like, no, no, no, no that was just initial thought. And from me the journal entry. Aspect of this was that these weren't songs I was putting on a napkin and sharing with anybody, they were my napkins that were staying in my drawers in a time when I didn't really know how or if music was gonna become a component of my life again. But what happen was, I needed to heal and I needed to process When we were talking about this before you mentioned among the you've talked about the divorce and the falling in love and and the baby but that there was another very personal experience that you had that kind of opened you up to making this record and that you just hadn't really felt like you've been in the right Environment, to talk about that. Do you wanna talk about it? This is the only place I think I've had the thought that it would be the right time to share it and that is that I went through a miscarriage and so many of us have. And I know that that's something that's completely normal but I only know that now Because no one told me that it was normal. And so going through the process of it. Having met someone and falling head over heels and really experienced this tidal wave of love. Based on the fact that like on a biological level I've met my person that I'm supposed to have kids with And then finding out that maybe I couldn't and facing the reality that was something real and then the excitement that we were pregnant and then losing that was sad and hard. I think a lot of people understand what that feels like but then. And I watched the most incredible transformation of all these strangers then turning into angels. And not just angels that were coming from me to help me, but they felt helped by me, that I gave them the permission to talk about it. And everyone started telling me their experiences and more than half the women in the room and had miscarriages. Wow. And I couldn't believe it and I thought to myself, wow, maybe this isn't just about that experience, maybe miscarriages. Happens all the time. But maybe miscarriages are a metaphor for everything else that happens all the time that we don't talk about. So, falling in love with someone when you're married to someone else is a **** thing to have happen. It's not fun. And it's not fun for anyone. But when you're not inviting it, and then it happens to you, and then you you talk about it a little bit. It's amazing how many stories have come back to me. It's amazing how many people felt like they finally, I was inviting the truth for myself and that made it possible for other people to come to me and feel connected to me in a way that I had never invited in before. I think that's why so many of us turn to music is in those times when you're looking for that. Common experience. And I think this is actually a weirdly good transition. I did not plan this, but one of the reasons I was so interested and excited to interview Grace is that she grew up in Vermont and I grew up in Vermont, and it's just not a place- Where's Vermont? I think in my experience at least if you grow up in a more world place, a place where maybe you don't have many people that you know who go on to careers like Grammy nominated And I think in Vermont, there were such, such a small collection of musicians that it made it possible for me to kind of find my footing as a big fish in a small pond, no pun intended because fish is the only other [ UNKNOWN ] that came out of Vermont [ CROSSTALK ] Yeah. [ LAUGH ] [ LAUGH ] But I think the person there was a few people but my mother said to me, Grace, famous occurs. Find a way to be famous in small circles and matter to a few people and have your gravity hold its place. Trying to cover the world with your icing isn't gonna work because there's just too much there. Yeah. And so I'm exploring those layers now and I'm grateful to my mother for reminding me of that. That's wonderful. Do we have any questions for grace in the audience? I'm looking for the paddle. Okay. Yes, we do have one back here. If you could just wait for the yellow paddle to make it to you. Not a question. Just a comment. I've seen you performance Seattle, Washington and my huge, huge fan. So if you haven't listened to Chris Potter, you're amazing. thank you for sharing. Thank you. Well, you're about to get to [ APPLAUSE ] That's so sweet. Okay, I just okay, no let's do a question wrap up over here. I was just gonna say again to Allie, I worked at Viacom if each one when you are, artists, so it's great to kind of be reacquainted for your sleater. Thank you. Thank you so much. I've also seen you in a [ INAUDIBLE ] [ LAUGH ] Okay, so some people have seen me, it's very cool. This is a different setting than I'm used to so I just assumed that everybody here is a CEO or like have started some start up company and I'm like, I can play with guitar. [ LAUGH ] Well, you're all are about to hear it for yourselves if you have not, I just have to literally ask you one very quick question, which is, you describe yourself as a space nerd. Yeah. And your name is Sagan. Sagan. And very briefly, like, where did that come from? Well, I fell in love with a man who was as much in love with space as me and Having come through high school being discouraged from stem like all science technology, you know, engineering and math was not my forte and when I tested poorly, I found myself in a position where. I was like okay, well I just going to do the music thing, which is I think that's kind of where we started. But I was approached by NASA to be an outreach representative and to be someone who could be a spokesperson for NASA, especially women in STEM. So I made a music video with one of my songs called look what we've become which is a song about Thank you so much Grace. [ APPLAUSE ] We are now going to get a special performance from Grace Potter. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

One On One with Grace Potter

Entertainment

Grace Potter discusses her career, marriage, and growth as an artist.