Grace Potter & The Trespassers at Globe Iron

With her new album Trespasser, Grace Potter introduces a beautifully unruly cast of characters who step into forbidden spaces with absolute abandon. As the spiritual sequel to 2023’s Mother Road, the four-time Grammy nominee’s seventh studio LP continues the kaleidoscopic storyline drawn from bi-coasal life between Topanga Canyon, CA and the her family farm in her native Vermont (a road-trip journey she’s made eight times in the last five years, usually on her own). But while Mother Road was born from a desperate need for solace in the midst of emotional freefall, Trespasser reveals an artist firmly anchored in her singular vision. The latest chapter in a career marked by endless transformation and elite recognition—including sharing stages with rock & roll icons like the Rolling Stones & Robert Plant and earning praise from legends like Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt—Trespasser ultimately lights the way toward a more unbound and expansive means of moving through the world. “I believe we need to challenge the way we’ve been told to navigate our lives, because so many of the boundaries we’ve set up aren’t working; we’re not living authentically,” says Potter. “I respect boundaries when they’re clear and meaningful, but when they feel arbitrary or put in place without question, I think we need to push against them. So many of those fences exist in our own minds—but when you step beyond them, it completely shifts your perspective. It can open everything up, like suddenly seeing the world in Technicolor.” Arriving on the heels of 2025’s Medicine (a long-shelved album made with T Bone Burnett back in 2008), Trespasser emerged from an untethered process that Potter likens to piecing together an elaborate mosaic, beginning with two weeks of kinetic sessions after a 2025 tour with country superstar Chris Stapleton. “It was a strange vision quest for me because I’ve never worked this way before,” she says. “I typically prefer everything to be recorded quick and dirty–ensuring a cohesive sound—but this time, we broke the mold.” Produced by her husband and frequent collaborator Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Weezer, Slash) and recorded in a cross-country journey beginning at her home in Topanga with Benmont Tench (Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers), continuing in Nashville with Mother Road session players Nick Bockrath (Cage the Elephant), Tim Deaux (Kings of Leon), and Matt Musty (Train), and completed in Vermont with members of her longtime live band (guitarists Indya Bratton and Ricky Dover Jr, bassist Kurtis Keber, drummer Jordan West), the album echoes its origins with a wayward sound that spans from stripped-bare soul to cosmic country to hellraising rock & roll—all while orbiting Potter’s force-of-nature voice and lavishly imagined storytelling. “So many of these lyrics came to life because of the tumultuous times we’re living through,” notes Potter, who plays Hammond B-3 Organ, guitar, piano, percussion, flute, Wurlitzer, and more on the album. “But as much as the world is destabilized, with this record I really felt myself honing in on my purpose and sense of worth, including my ability to convey human emotion in a very specific way.” In a prime example of Trespasser’s unfettered humanity, the album’s hypnotic and sprawling title track finds Potter inhabiting the mindset of a man who wandered into her home one night in 2020. “We were sitting on the couch when someone in the middle of a mental health crisis walked into our house, thinking it was his,” she recalls. “He said that his wife had called him to dinner and how we must be the locusts that ate her—he was in a reign of terror in his mind, which was even scarier when we found out later that he had a knife on him. Of course it was really disconcerting, but instead of panicking we leaned in and tried to meet him where he was. It’s not that I have a blind faith in people, but I do think humanity breaks down when you choose fear over curiosity.”