The Lion The Beast The Beat

The Lion The Beast The Beat, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals' fourth studio album for Hollywood Records, will be released on June 12th. The musically powerful and conceptually dazzling work was produced by Jim Scott (Tom Petty, Wilco, the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s 2012 Grammy winner Revelator) and Potter at Scott’s studio PLYRZ in Santa Clarita, CA, with the exception of "Loneliest Soul," which was produced by Dan Auerbach and engineered by Collin Dupuis at Easy Eye Sounds in Nashville, TN. 

David Campbell (Beck, My Morning Jacket, Jackson Browne) arranged and conducted the strings on the album. The album was mixed by fellow Vermonter and Grammy award winner Rich Costey (Foo Fighters, TV on the Radio, Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball) and mastered by Grammy award winner Bob Ludwig (David Bowie, Rolling Stones, Radiohead, Foo Fighters). The first single from The Lion The Beast The Beat  is "Never Go Back," written by Dan Auerbach and Grace Potter & The Nocturnals. The track went to radio on March 23rd for an April 9th impact date. GPN's debut performance of "Never Go Back" is set for April 5th on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. A companion video for the track will be shot in Los Angeles in April. 

"I think there’s a Lion and a Beast within all of us— as humans. There's also true goodness, and the appearance of goodness…" says Grace. "Maybe I’ve watched too much Mad Men, but I'm in love with the idea of a story with no heroes and no villains. I've never really even dipped my toes in the whole 'concept album' thing but these themes just kept creeping into all the new songs and I didn’t fight it. I decided to embrace it."

Among the song titles are Stars, The Divide, Steady, Parachute Heart, Never Go Back, and Loneliest Soul, both co-written with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, and the title track The Lion The Beast The Beat. 

"Each song stands upright on its own, but these songs really belong to this album. The way we’ve always made records is to put together a list of 30 or so songs, pick the best ones, throw them together and hope it congeals. I didn’t wanna do that this time. I came up with the track order before we recorded so we could really bring you in and out of these songs like scenes in a movie. I want to bring the listener into our weird fantasy and keep them there."

Norah Jones— Little Broken Hearts

Norah Jones is unveiling something new at South By Southwest— again. Ten years after she shook Austin and the entire music world with "Come Away With Me," the 25 million-selling debut she released just weeks before the 2002 conference and festival, she returned to play her entire new album "Little Broken Hearts" at La Zona Rosa in Austin on Saturday night. "It seemed to make sense to come back to my new record," Jones explained. "I'm just going to play the new record. I'm not even going to play any old songs because it's South By Southwest. It doesn't seem wrong to me to do it that way. It's fun. This is a festival. It's for new bands but it's also just for new stuff, so it feels right to do the new record."

The stylish yet deeply emotional and introspective collaboration with Danger Mouse is due to be released on Tuesday, May 1st. In a brief interview on Friday, Jones described "Little Broken Hearts" as a concept album of sorts that examines a difficult breakup. She said she and Danger Mouse, the producer whose given name is Brian Burton, wrote most of the songs as a team, working out lyrics and the instrumentation together. It's something of a departure for Jones and yet another step in her evolution away from the jazz of the Grammy-winning tune "Come Away With Me."

Jones came back to SXSW in 2006 with her side project The Little Willies, a group that she played two shows with on Thursday. The experience performing as a solo artist will be a little less discombobulating this time around. "It was kind of crazy," Jones said. "I remember 10 years ago when I came... and it was insane. It was like we were doing four shows a day or something. I don't know. It felt very strange, but it was fun."