Grace Potter on how she achieved musical stardom by trespassing

Vermont-born rock star Grace Potter releases her seventh studio album on Aug. 21. “Trespasser” is the latest offering from the four-time Grammy nominee.Potter burst onto the music scene in 2002 with Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. Since that group disbanded in 2015, Potter has gone on to tour with some of the country’s top musical acts, including the Rolling Stones, Kenny Chesney and country star Chris Stapleton, with whom she is touring this fall.Potter will bring her act to Burlington on Sept. 18 when her annual Grand Point North festival kicks off. Profits will go toward Potter’s Grand Point Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the arts in Vermont.Potter, 43, divides her time between homes in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, where she grew up and attended high school, and Topanga Canyon, California. “Trespasser” was produced by her husband and frequent collaborator Eric Valentine. The two have a son together.“Trespasser” was partly inspired by a line from the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land.” Potter sang it: “As I was walking that ribbon of highway, there was a wall that said private property, but on the other side it didn't say nothing. That side is made for you and me.”That idea of crossing boundaries “was the engine that was running all of my lyrical landscaping at that point.”The title song includes a refrain, “As I hurried home … I heard an icy refrain … bow to the master.” What did she mean?Potter said she wrote the lyrics “in an early round of rounding up immigrants, and it wasn't called ICE at the time. … Little did I know that a few years later there would really be this icy refrain.”Potter — who says she got kicked out of band at Harwood Union High School when it was discovered that she could not read music — said she feels she has been trespassing her whole career.“I will often get off stage and look at my bandmates or look at whoever is there side-stage and go: I just got away with it again, like I'm robbing a bank,” she said. “My passion and my commitment to basically all forms of art is mostly based on my fascination with how I'm able to get away with this over and over again. I don't think I've ever said that out loud.”“If you want a scoop,” she told me, “it's just that I continue to be rewarded for something that comes extremely naturally to me, and I'm lucky enough to have been kind of cattle prodded into it by really encouraging, inspired, wonderful family members and friends and cohorts who saw what I had better than I— better than I did.”