Songfacts®:

• In 2021, Grace Potter, the frontwoman of the Vermont-based rock band Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, didn't feel like she had control over anything in her life. As a pandemic gripped the world and threw a wrench into her solo career, she also suffered from depression and anxiety after a miscarriage. The one place that always made her feel in control was behind the wheel, so she planned four road trips that traversed the iconic Route 66, a US highway that stretches from Chicago to Los Angeles. The journey inspired her third solo album, Mother Road, and its title track about finding freedom on the open road.
  
  In a 2023 Songfacts interview, Potter explained her reasoning behind taking the trips: "I was home in Vermont, I was in my hometown, but I felt so removed from the person I thought I would be at this point in my life. Especially having lived that happily ever after. I thought I had it all and so I couldn't understand or reset my mind into a place of being ok and my mental health was a real factor in this as well. I'd love to say I was just frivolously like, 'Oh let's la dee da my way across the country until I find myself and write a hit album.'
  
  No, it was kind of the opposite. I was just broken and screwed up and needed to feel the freedom that I longed for, and honestly that the pandemic pulled out from all of us."
• Mother Road was the name given to Route 66 by John Steinbeck in his 1939 novel The Grapes Of Wrath. The road was one of the country's earliest highways and was the primary route traveled by people who migrated west, like the poor tenant farmers in the novel who leave Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl in search of a better life in California.
• Potter began her solo career in earnest with her major-label debut, the pop album, Midnight. Her next album, the soulful, Americana-influenced Daylight (2019), earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album at the 2021 Grammy Awards. Potter told Songfacts she thought the album was "the beginning of an exciting trajectory, and a career reboot I was really excited to roll up my sleeves and dive into," but the pandemic had other plans. That's when she started putting her travel itinerary together, which led to Mother Road.
• Catherine Fordham directed the video, the majority of which takes place inside Hurricane's Cafe on Lomas Boulevard, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.