Album Review: Grace Potter, ‘Trespasser’

(Thirty Tigers, CD, digital, vinyl)

Hauling down dusty roads and interminable highways is intrinsic to the American character. Call it poetic; call it stark reality: It’s a big country with a piss-poor public transit system, built for gas-guzzling cars and trucker speed but also perfect cruising soundtracks. So we romanticize the road trip, a liminal experience that can feel dreamlike the longer one stays on the road.

That near-hallucinatory weariness and the ragged, second-wind energy of gearing up for another 18-hour drive permeates Trespasser, the latest LP from Grace Potter, released last week. The Waitsfield native, who when not in the Green Mountains spends a chunk of the year in Topanga, Calif., has logged a lot of hours trekking coast to coast. And while 2023’s Mother Road was a tribute of sorts to that commute, Trespasser is closer to what you might find in Potter’s dream journal, mid-journey.

The record is crawling with characters she imagined while crossing state line after state line. “Ride or Die,” a rollicking, R&B-flavored rocker, tells the story of a wild-hearted vagabond who drives her car off a bridge. The character is later resurrected in the ghostly doo-wop send-up “Gasoline.” Murderous restaurateurs and tragic delivery drivers also populate Potter’s dark, mythic road diary.

Potter’s songs are as restless as the nomadic characters she sings about on Trespasser. A four-time Grammy nominee who is one of Vermont’s most successful musical exports, she has never been shy about tweaking her sound. She’s moved from roots rock to poppier realms, country duets with the likes of Kenny Chesney to full rustic folk on her 2025 T Bone Burnett-produced record Medicine.

Trespasser is the most eclectic record of Potter’s career. She swings for the fences with pop-hit fodder such as the album’s first single, “Love Me Not”; goes goth folk on the title track; and channels ’70s Heart on “War on the Mountain.”

They’re not all bull’s-eyes. Opening track “Main Street U.S.A.” huffs and puffs with R&B-tinged Southern-rock bluster but feels more than a little rote, with a chorus that seems custom-made to sell jeans or launch the latest menu at a corporate bar and grill. And the line “You ain’t an appetizer, you’re the whole damn dish” in the otherwise completely fine “Lost Café” isn’t doing anyone any favors.

If Trespasser is a concept record, it’s a tenuous one — more of a concept by convenience. But sonically, Potter has never sounded better. Her five-star voice is still the main attraction, as mighty as it is sensual, capable of breathy, melodic intimacy and soaring, sky-shaking power. Her husband, Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Weezer), once again produces, and the couple’s collaboration has only gotten more natural with each release.

Potter has had an intimate relationship with the road since she was just a teenager, touring the country — and the world — with the Nocturnals and later as a solo act. Her latest paean to the journey itself has a few bumps but is otherwise a smooth ride.

Trespasser is available on major streaming services. Potter headlines the Grand Point North festival at Burlington’s Waterfront Park, September 18 to 20.