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Coda graCe Potter The sun’s upon a gambling day, his queen smiled low and blissfully Let’s make some wretched fool to pay, plain it was she did agree —TVZ, “Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” from High, Low and In Between G race Potter laughs righteously. She speaks jovially. Streams thoughts like an overfed water main. The youthful singersongwriter , born June 20, 1983, in Waitsfield, Vermont, channels her buoyant traits into a modern musical hybrid that blends classic rock swagger and punk rock attitude with soul music’s deep Grace Potter, Austin City Limits Music Festival, Austin, TX, October 9, 2010 206 CoDA passion.1 Grace Potter and the Nocturnals garnered critical acclaim and a significant jam-band following with early efforts such as Nothing But the Water (2005) and This Is Somewhere (2007), but did not earn commercial success until their self-titled third album entered into Billboard’s Top 20 in June 2010. By that point, Potter and the Nocturnals already had performed and toured with high-profile artists such as the Black Crowes, Dave Matthews Band, Gov’t Mule, and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James.2 Like James, Potter discovered the recently deceased Townes Van Zandt early on. His mournful spirit immediately transcended worldly binds. “I was sixteen years old and my parents were on a road trip,” Potter says. “We had this house-sitter guy who was kind of a weirdo from Norway or Romania, and he played all this Townes Van Zandt. All I could think of was, ‘This dude is crying with his voice.’ Regardless of the lyrics, just the way he sounds in the background in another room sounds like somebody is moaning in a really haunting, beautiful , rich, soulful, completely unstylized way. It was completely his own thing, and I had never heard anything like it before. Townes and the way he played [were] singular. “‘Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold’ is my favorite. The thing that I love so much is that there’s this whole double entendre of a card game, but really it’s a true-life story. All those parallels he draws and all those things he describes and each card having its own character and its own spirit. Those are real people, and all that probably really happened . He just happened to fit it into a card game and made it into his own magic story. God, it’s so good. I love the way he brings that song all the way back around like a fucking Rubik’s Cube. He’s telling a story, and it just happens to turn back around. It wasn’t like he sat there and thought about it and went into his rhyming dictionary and picked over every single word. It really flows like complete streamof -consciousness. It fell out of him. You’re like, ‘Holy shit, I just got mind-fucked by Townes Van Zandt.’” 3 ...

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