From rock to country and back

Grace Potter & The Nocturnals sample country with a spot on Kenny Chesney's tour.

|
Charles Sykes/AP
Grace Potter, Nocturnals

Grammy-nominated country singer Kenny Chesney has been featuring an unusual element on his concert tour with Tim McGraw this summer. It's not a fledgling fellow country musician opening their show, but indie-rockers Grace Potter & the Nocturnals.

Instead of earthy harmonies and slide guitar, Potter wields a Flying V Gibson, screams like a banshee when the urge strikes, and leads a band that won't be mistaken for Rascal Flatts anytime soon by the surprised if not intrigued country fans filling the stadiums.

"Overall it's positive, but I do think there's a lot of baffled people," Potter says during a recent telephone interview from California. "I look on some people's faces and there's a look of utter confusion. And I look on other people's faces and there's pure joy and they're dancing around like crazy."

Potter and her Nocturnals – guitarists Benny Yurco and Scott Tournet, drummer Matt Burr, and bassist Michael Libramento – travel a road familiar to many outsider musicians who, at one point or another, found themselves on Music Row in Nashville, Tenn.

Bob Dylan switched directions way back in 1969. More recently, so have Darius Rucker, Robert Plant, Bon Jovi, Nelly, Kid Rock, and Lionel Richie, among others.

For Potter, it started with a phone call out of the blue from Chesney, whom she had never met, asking whether she would be interested in singing together. Potter downloaded a demo track and thus began her unexpected foray into country music.

"Within the first three words of the song, I was in love," she says. "A couple of days later, I flew down to Nashville, and the rest is history," meaning a duo-recorded Grammy nominated hit song.

Potter's recent genre-hopping all but makes her a one-woman iPod shuffle. She captures the range of rock and country on her band's new album, "The Lion The Beast The Beat." The deluxe edition features duets with both Chesney ("Stars") and Willie Nelson ("Ragged Company").

R&B legend Stevie Wonder, pop-soul hitmaker Daryl Hall, and guitar hero Joe Satriani have all shared stages with Potter in recent years. Of late, Potter has been writing with Wayne Coyne, front man for psychedelic rockers The Flaming Lips. Their charge: making music for a Tim Burton Disney movie, a mash-up of styles emblematic of what Potter and her band mates see as a crucial ingredient for success.

"It just goes to show that [when it comes to] genre and music, it's not about putting something in a box and categorizing it," she says. "It's about finding your own sound within it and being true to a song."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to From rock to country and back
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2012/0807/From-rock-to-country-and-back
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe