Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

http://www.gracepotter.com/

Turns out Vermont isn't as tranquil as the tourism council would have you believe. Ever since their 2002 debut, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals – Vermonters all – have stirred up the national music scene with their blues-based rock. Fronted by the 24-year-old Potter on vocals and B3, the band includes guitarist Scott Tournet, bassist Bryan Dondero and drummer Matt Burr.

The band was formed in 2002 by Potter and Burr while attending St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. After Tournet joined them, the nascent unit recorded its homemade debut album, Original Soul, in 2004, with Dondero completing the lineup just weeks before they banged out their second album, the self-produced Nothing but the Water.

They’re a neoclassic rock & roll band possessing bona fide chops, a natural sense of dynamics and a palate containing all the useful colors, and these qualities allow them to stretch out onstage, to riveting effect.Perhaps their greatest asset is the ability to transcend genres, never content to settle into one predefined sound. GPN were once the up-and-coming darlings of the modern jazz and blues scene, receiving incessant comparisons to Norah Jones and Lucinda Williams. Yet their magnetic live shows and dedication to the road earned the band a warm welcoming from the jam-band community, leading to two nominations at the 2006 Jammy’s. At the same time, their most recent album, This is Somewhere, is a testament to the band’s true roots – pure rock music. The influence of predecessors The Band, The Rolling Stones, and Little Feat is clear. Still, GPN’s raw passion and uncompromising politics more directly evoke the memory of the great Neil Young & Crazy Horse, whose Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere served as one of the inspirations for the album title.