Grace Potter stuns Nashville's Ryman with masterful, entertaining rock showcase

Six months have elapsed since "Mother Road" – the ninth studio album over 22 years affiliated with Vermont-born rocker Grace Potter – arrived.

In the time it's taken Potter to arrive back at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium (she last played the venue in February 2020), most of America has survived COVID-19. Plus, Americana and country music — some of Music City's most valuable commercial exports — have rekindled a five-decade-long love affair with Mississippi River basin swamp rock, Fleetwood Mac's soulful, psychedelic folk and Joni Mitchell's superstar days in Laurel Canyon.

One listen to the Grammy-nominated performer's live set would make you believe that something similar to what's grooving sections of Nashville of late and what three other acts – John Mayall and The Blues Breakers, Janis Joplin and the Kozmic Blues Band, plus Sly and The Family Stone (the latter, specifically, live at Woodstock in 1969) – crafted in three years between July 1966 and July 1969 had been revived.

However, it's imperative to cast the recalling of vibes familiar to lives and times lived sixty years ago – amid life and times moving forward around her – as nothing short of the type of alchemical reclamation possible for only the most seasoned and already gifted of artisans.

Thus, the vibe is not so much Potter cosplaying Joplin as it is getting lost in Potter's two hours of blistering grooves and imagining a moment when Potter and her band are traveling on Interstate 10 from East Texas to San Francisco.

On that road, a Waffle House now stands 15 minutes outside downtown Phoenix, where a tumbleweed rolled when Joplin drove the same road decades ago.

Potter and the band – like hearing the vestiges of Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" fading in the distance from the Ryman's sound system as she began her set – stop their van, pull into the parking lot and turn off their radio as the automobile engine quiets.

As they head in for breakfast in the still of the night, Potter, in a manner not dissimilar from a brief exultation onstage on Friday night, screams, "Oh my sweet maple syrup, this is amazing."

Though, in what's becoming a fever dream, the waffles she's about to eat aren't vegan but the maple syrup she's about to slather on them is.

In the glass half-full manner in which Grace Potter and 2,500 people occupied space in a shared sonic universe, life is never really half bad.

Here are a few other stunning takes from Friday night at country music's Mother Church.

Potter takes cinematic license with powerful dynamics

Within three minutes of the first, bluesy song of her headlining Ryman set, Potter – who took painstaking intention to inform a crowd seated in a church that she was "a swashbuckling son of a b***h" familiar with the art of "tawdry bulls**t" – played her opening song, "Lady Vagabond," from her latest album.

Because they bought tickets to a Grace Potter concert in Nashville, nearly 3,000 people unwittingly agreed to have their spirits Rumplestilskined into a Ford Thunderbird set for a whirlwind, two-hour ride down lessons learned on America's highways.

The song arrived as Potter's voice trusted through the air with rapier-style wit – shrieks from the crowd confirmed she'd hit her mark thousands of times.

"When I came into this world / I cut the silence with my howl / I was forged in the mountains / 'Til the wheel brought me on down / The world never saw me coming / When it did it started running / That's why time flies whenever I'm around," she sings.

The song's surreal honesty set the tone for the evening that followed.

'Amazing Grace' / 'Big White Gate'

Seventy-five minutes into her set, a red jumpsuit-clad production tech hilariously informed her that the "bubblegum pop" she was playing in country music's most hallowed hall was undesirable.

Entirely removed from any standard sense of reality, space and time, the crowd hooted and howled as the tech escorted Potter's band offstage and left her onstage with a keyboard and a spotlight.

As she often did during her set, Potter began to spin a yarn while playing familiar chords to a track she didn't intend to cover. She's foremost a creative musician – it's clear that the vernacular of rock's impact on popular culture is her first language.

She played "Amazing Grace" to ironically note that she was not an "egotistical, self-puffing up type of person."

In short, she's not "the 'save you from death' kind of amazing."

For 16 years, people have believed Potter's "Big White Gate" to be an homage to her grandmother.

At The Ryman, with the stained glass of the Mother Church in her eyes, she testified that she was lying all along.

"It's from old Grace to younger Grace," she offered.

"I sang to my children before they strayed so far / I sang for my lover or a nickel in a tip jar / I never knew Jesus, I never read the Good Book / But on my day of dying I'm giving life a second look," she sang.

The crowd, now stung in their souls by the metaphorical sword that killed them an hour ago, stood in raptured, raucous ovation.

Brittney Spencer (and Grace Bowers), blessed

Calling Brittney Spencer a country star is like calling Taylor Swift merely a talented songwriter.

Encapsulating their art with the bare minimum of their gifts is absurd.

Spencer's rise from social media obscurity to global touring stardom is not a tale told by her being constantly discovered by artists, including The Highwomen quartet of Brandi Carlile, Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris and Amanda Shires, plus artists including Mickey Guyton, Jason Isbell, Reba McEntire, Potter, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Weir.

Cast the story as "Brittney Spencer's comforting and comforted sonic therapy has integrated itself into a community that wears its heart on its sleeve" and you're – to borrow an appropriate line from The Indigo Girls – closer to fine.

As an opener for Potter, Spencer's debut artist album "My Stupid Life" plays like the first half of a strange cinematic triple-feature of teen drama "10 Things I Hate About You," countercultural touchstone film "Easy Rider" and when Potter and Spencer perform together, the virtues of "exuberant and tremendously vibrant consciousness" that three-decade-old "Thelma and Louise" is best-regarded for extolling.

It took five minutes for emerging teenage guitar star Grace Bowers to join Spencer onstage for the breezy guitar-pop track "First Car Feeling."

Spencer is the type of artist who is blithely unaware of her stardom but also keenly aware that she's cresting whatever wave she's riding alongside the generational superstars she's blessed to count as friends.

Thus, Bowers' onstage invitation was as much a moment to honor her talent as it was to invite her, on potential and skill alone – like Spencer was during COVID-19's quarantine – into a larger, now multigenerational, superstar canon.

Four solo songs – "Bigger Than The Song," "100 Years Old," "My First Rodeo" and "Night In" – later and the breadth of Spencer's talents swept the Ryman to its feet.

Each song unifies like an infinity gauntlet, assuring Spencer's career stardom, which will be built on songwriting, compassion, heart-wrenching torch songs, and authentic, rocking relatability.

Expect nothing, have gratitude for 'everything' in return

Potter's oldest parlor trick is her ability to extend 2005's "Nothing But The Water" from 3 to 11 minutes in length.

Indeed, it didn't start as one.

She's been a rock star for 20 years, so mimicking Sly Stone's ability to take 10 of 50 minutes of his Woodstock set to play "I Wanna Take You Higher" and "Music Lover" is as much to maintain fans' attention as it is to revel in the fact that the greatest trick she's ever pulled is convincing talent bookers to let her continually wear ski socks under go-go boots, plus fringe and rhinestones instead of attire more sensible to her brand of frenetic, kinetic maelstrom.

At various points in Potter's set, the consumption, exhuming and refitting of pop's most ribald histories occurs.

Watch the sounds and vibes responsible for Joe Cocker's gesticulating grit emerge as two friends – Potter and Spencer – get by via "Little Hitchhiker"'s story of a little girl "(finding) what (she's) lookin' for."

Most significantly, her latest album's title track swirls the best parts of 90s era Melissa Etheridge with a rock group, sans the E Street Band, channeling the urgent, dive bar soul of Bruce Springsteen's breakout era.

A moment of thanks for the excitement of an energetic crowd encapsulated what has allowed her art to endure.

"I expect nothing from you – I'm only grateful for what you bring."

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Grace Potter stuns Nashville's Ryman with masterful, entertaining rock showcase