The album manifests incredible growth in the writing and singing of 24-year-old phenomenon Grace Potter, who has clearly found her true voice in both respects, as well as the instrumental prowess of the band: Potter on the Hammond B3, guitarist Scott Tournet, bassist Bryan Dondero and drummer Matt Burr. On this remarkable record, they make a glorious racket indeed.

The band's timeless, organic brand of American rock & roll is fully in evidence throughout This Is Somewhere. "I wanted to challenge my own creative potential," Potter says of the impulse that fueled her explosion of creativity. "Until this point, I'd never written a political song. Although I was an activist all through college - I marched on Washington, got arrested--I never felt the need to put it into a song. I wasn't angry enough...but that changed, obviously. I began to feel that the time was right, and out came 'Ah Mary'--Mary sure does have her issues."

This band has something else going for it -- Potter's innate star quality. As critic Jeff Davidson wrote last September in a piece posted on TMZ.com, "...she is easily the most glamorous star to rise from the jam scene, and her million-dollar smile makes her as desirable as any pop songstress. The fact that she's amazingly talented...makes her even sexier."

The sessions were conducted in a Los Angeles studio with song-centric producer Mike Daly, who has forged a booming career for himself after coming on the radar as Whiskeytown's resident multi-instrumentalist; A-list engineer Joe Chicarelli, who joined the project between his co-production of the Shins' Wincing the Night Away and setting up a Nashville studio for the White Stripes album project; and mix master Michael Brauer, whose credits span from Coldplay's Parachutes to My Morning Jacket's Acoustic Citousca.

Says Daly: "If the songs are right and you nail it at that level, everything else falls into place. Grace is a really talented writer, and I definitely threw down the gauntlet to her: 'Blow my mind--play me some ridiculously great songs.' And she came through. The whole band rose to the occasion. If you want to make a great record, the only way it gets there is to hold them to a higher standard, and the band pulled it off."

And just like that, this surprising and deeply resonant album lifts Potter and the Nocturnals into the rarefied stratum presently occupied by Wilco and My Morning Jacket--bands that combine a reverence for rock's rich heritage with a sense of adventure and a need to express something honest and heartfelt. We can't have too many of those, can we? Welcome to the club, kids.

ABOUT THE ALBUM ARTWORK
The front and back cover images are taken from a photographic document of the mounting of the largest American flag ever made up to that time; it was hung on New York's Verrazano Bridge to commemorate America's Bicentennial in 1976. The photos were shot by Dream On Productions, an art collective founded by Grace's father, Sparky Potter, and commissioned by New York advertising executive turned flag-obsessed Vermonter Len Silverfine, who came up with the idea and secured the involvement of the city and state of New York. Silverfine had the flag assembled by a sailmaking company in Marblehead, Mass., and, two days before the Bicentennial, it was unfurled from the side of the bridge in a dress rehearsal. Hanging from the arching steel structure, the huge flag looked "magnificent--a real show-stopper," Sparky recalls. But then the wind unexpectedly picked up, causing the flag to billow dramatically. Realizing that the heavy, wind-whipped flag could very possibly tax the structure of the bridge, the engineers on hand called for it to be taken down, and Sparky was one of the five crew members who held onto a halyard in an attempt to pull back one of its corners. "It's an amazing piece of Americana," says Sparky, "and it probably would've stayed stashed away in the closet if Gracie hadn't had a momentary flash about some slides of an American flag that she remembered from her childhood."