You grew up in Nashville, surrounded by both music and faith. If you go back to the beginning, what was your earliest connection to music?
We were a typical Southern family. We went to church three times a week. I was the youngest of four girls. I loved hymns. The church I went to, we didn’t have a choir, there was no organ, no piano. There was a song leader, and he would, like, on a pitch pipe, go ‘Hmm,’ this is the key we’re in, you know? And I just loved it. I loved it from the time I was a little kid, just the congregational singing.
That sounds like a very traditional foundation. What did that look like as you got a little older?
When I was in my early teens, there was a really unique church down in the Music Row area, which is all the publishing companies, the studios. They used to be really concentrated in one section of Nashville, so it was called Music Row. In the 60s and 70s, there were songwriters that would come to town, just a guitar slung on their back. Kris Kristofferson did that. Just lots of young songwriters. And this church that my sisters found was, you know, kind of the hippie movement, so their expression of all things faith was less the religious culture that I was accustomed to, and it was very vibrant, but it was kind of like the Jesus hippie movement. There were all these little cottage industries that surrounded that. Woodworking, stained glass, window makers, you know, everybody was just, like, not shaving under their arms, not wearing deodorant, probably smoking a lot of pot, and talking about Jesus. I was so fascinated with all of it. And there was a bookstore that had a little coffee area, and every Saturday night, they had free concerts. And for the first two years, it was the same band every Saturday night. And no ticket. But then, as the Jesus movement of music started in Southern California, anybody coming through Nashville would play Koinonia Bookstore. I just loved that, and I thought, man, I want to make some of this kind of music and sing it for my friends.
At what point did you go into song writing?
I was writing songs about faith. Not in a Southern Gospel way, but imitating the singer-songwriters that I grew up with. But I was doing it specifically for a program that I had signed up for at school. We had mandatory chapel service. It wasn’t a Christian school, it was just the South, you know, and they would have a rabbi come speak, or a minister, or a preacher, and I was just having this really amazing kind of introduction to my own faith journey. I didn’t have any answers, but I thought the conversation was so interesting. And I thought, ‘I wonder if I could sign up for one of these programs.’ And in my sophomore year, I did. That’s how I got started writing, was specifically for a thing for my school.
You were still in high school when you got arecording contract. How did that come about?
I made a tape because a friend of mine was taking engineering classes at Belmont, a great music school. And, he said, ‘Hey, I’ve got some free hours, do you want to go record some of your songs?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure!’ He was making copies of that tape at the studio where he had a job, and an old college friend of his walked in and said, ‘There’s this record company in Texas that’s looking for contemporary Christian music artists. There are not that many. Hey, who’s that?’ Without my knowing it, they called the record company and played that tape over the phone, and the record company in Waco, Texas, said, ‘Well, she’s not very good, but she sounds sincere.’ And that was the beginning of my recording career.
What do you remember about finding out that you had a record deal?
My friend, his name was Brown Bannister, he wound up producing a lot of my early records, and he called late one night, and he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, you have an offer for a record deal.’ Of course, I was 15 and insecure, and I thought that he was making fun of me. And it was a late- night call, and my father got on the phone, ‘Young lady, it’s after phone hours,’ and I actually got grounded. So, I got grounded and told about a record deal in the same conversation. (Laughs)
As it became real, what was going through your mind?
I mean, it just wasn’t anything I ever thought I would do. I was writing because I was just trying to figure out what I thought. Brown helped me make that record in the studio where he worked. I told none of my friends, I didn’t want them to feel sorry for me, if it was a bomb. And then that record wound up coming out around spring break of my senior year. Everybody’s holding their breath. And they said, ‘There’s an option, if this sells, you and the record company can decide if you ever want to do this again.’ At the end of each recording event, I’d go, ‘Okay, yeah, I thought that was pretty cool, I’ll do it again.’ But it was not ever because I pictured myself on a big stage, you know, and everybody I was around was always better than I was. I was like, ‘I can’t even figure this out.’ But to me, music is such an amazing connector. It connects people, it connects us to ourselves. I was using music to help connect me to God. Some songs were like a prayer, but just like everybody else, just trying to figure out life. And I feel like that’s been my whole journey. An opportunity will come by, and I’ll go, ‘Man, how did I get that?’ Now, 50 years later, here we are.
I grew up in the ’80s, and your music, alongside artists like Michael W. Smith and Michael Card, was part of that early wave bringing contemporary Christian music to a wider audience. Looking back, how would you describe that time from your perspective?
Well, first off, let me say, the 80s were so exciting. I finished my fourth year of college, in the spring of 1982. And before that, I had always been going to school full-time, high school, college, singing a lot in the summertime, but then to suddenly be finished with that chapter of my life and able to travel all the time. I mean, the musicians I traveled with were like my road family. But at home, I was part of a really big family. So, I would go from a long weekend singing to people I didn’t know, to returning to a family that was just full of all kinds of things. I had so many young nieces and nephews, it was such a great balance. I just was, like, swinging between one community and the other community. I had an opportunity to record at a destination studio called Caribou Ranch. It’s not in existence anymore, but all the early Chicago records were done there, and it was created by Jimmy Guercio. The first time recording there was the fall of 1981, and we recorded there well into the 80s, but then the studio burned down. The first week, everything was just so family and community oriented. We booked that place for two weeks. And the first week, all the musicians and their spouses and their kids would come. We ate dinner by lantern light at one long table. We were writing songs on the spot. It was just so fun, and so much exploration.
When did you begin to feel that momentum building around what you were doing?
We would finish a record, and then tour, tour, tour. Unbeknownst to me, I never thought through it, but then, tickets were selling, so promoters kept asking. The machine kept growing. And I think when something is successful, it just attracts more energy. So, promoters [said], ‘We’ll do another show,’ and [then] they’d go, ‘We’ve added 25 more shows,’ and I’m like, ‘Woo, okay, here we go.’ But it wasn’t because I had a game plan. And in the middle of all that, in the 80s, there were times in my life that were wonderful, and there were times that were really hard. But when your life is getting out on stage, I mean, I kind of laugh about when I was pregnant with my second. By then, we’re almost [in] the 90s. I took my first son on the road with me when he was little. He was not quite… he turned one, and we really didn’t end that tour until he was two. So, we would be out for four weeks, then home for 10 days, then out for five weeks, then home for a week; that’s just what life looked like. I did three different tours, very pregnant.
What did being on stage feel like for you in those moments?
I just loved the experience of music. It wasn’t about people cheering for me, it was about… to get to be a part of all of these people, creating… we’re singing songs we wrote. And then that feeling, I’m always looking at people in the audience, and I can see music is doing to them what it’s doing to me, and then it’s just like this big figure-eight of energy, and that’s beautiful.
“The Next Time I Fall” (1986), your duet with Peter Cetera, is still on my favorite song list. I know it was written for Chicago but given to Peter. How did you end up being part of it?
Well, first let me say, I was a huge Chicago fan from the time I was young. Michael Omartian was producing some of the sides for Peter’s record. I had met Michael several times when I was visiting Los Angeles. He was a renowned producer. And he was always so kind when we met, and he had said, ‘I would love to work with you someday.’ And up to that point, I’d only ever worked with my friend Brown. Anyway, when they were looking for a duet partner for Peter, that side was being produced by Michael Omartian, and he said, ‘I think we should have Amy Grant do it.’ And Peter said, ‘Who’s that?’ (Laughs) I was 25, and I happened to be visiting a good friend of mine who lived in Atlanta. And, I mean, nobody had cell phones. It was 1986. The phone rings, and my friend Jeannie said, ‘It’s for you.’ It’s Michael Omartian. I mean, I’m going, how did you know where to find me? And he said, ‘Hey, we would love for you to sing a duet with Peter Cetera.’ And like everything in my life, it worked out just like I didn’t plan. And I remember thinking, just in a flash, ‘Have all the female singers suddenly disappeared from the universe, that you are calling me?’ But Omartian liked the sound of my voice, and he thought it would sound good with Peter. I remember flying to LA to sing with him. Even the way he produced me, I’d never worked with another producer, and he wanted to layer my voice. He said, ‘I like it best when it’s, like, four tracks of you singing on top,’ so I just sang the same thing four times through. And Peter was there… a lot of times, in the studio, you can do a song with somebody, but never see them. But he came to hang out in the studio, and we sang on mic together, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! What a great community!’
It went to No. 1 on the Billboard pop charts. When did it first hit you that the song had taken off like that?
That summer of ‘86 was a really busy touring time for me, and I remember having done kind of a long stint in Australia and New Zealand, and coming home, and I can’t even remember who I was in the car with, and I went, ‘Man, I never did hear that song, “Next Time I Fall.” I had such high hopes for it. It seemed like a great song.’ And they said, ‘Amy, it’s number one on the pop chart.’
That’s awesome.
I know, but it was just because I was busy working. And then that actually wound up being a really, really difficult time in my personal life. And I remember Peter calling me, saying, ‘Come do this show, come do this show,’ and I can’t remember all the details of what it was, but I was just really struggling, and I said, ‘I don’t have the bandwidth to come do your show right now.’ But you just walk through the doors that open. He and I had a chance to sing together, later. I think, in some ways, I let him down, because I wasn’t available to do publicity that he wanted me to do, but you only have so much gas in the tank.
Do you remember the first time you heard yourself on the radio?
I do. I think I was still in high school, and we had an AM station that played contemporary Christian music. And what I remembered… this is so stupid, but whoever was the engineer in that studio… you know, if the sibilance is too much, you can kind of roll the S’s off. Whoever was the engineer in that studio, they had set the de-esser to such an extreme, it sounded like I had a lisp, and that’s all I could hear. ‘Somebody hit the right button! I sound like I don’t know how to say an S!”
A couple of years later, in 1991, you came out with Heart in Motion, a defining moment in your career as it opened things up to a much wider audience. Was there a reason you waited to make that move?
Well, I was so glad to participate with Peter Cetera on “Next Time I Fall,” but that just kind of felt like a one-off to me. I had mentioned that it was kind of a rough stretch for me, so getting back into writing… all through ‘87, I went into therapy. What wound up happening was, I did a record called Lead Me On. That was the last recording I did in the ‘80s. And most of my following had really developed through a lot of touring and kind of a grassroots situation. And it was really touring that record with Michael W. Smith and myself… we were old friends by then, and it was a great touring experience for both of us. That tour just lasted and lasted, and that really is what, I think, what made A&M Records sit up and say, ‘She has an untapped audience.’And because of where my life had been before that, Lead Me On was a more serious record. Honestly, I got to the end of all that touring, and I was pregnant with my second child, and I was just ready to laugh. So, it was not a record company move. I just thought, ‘God, can somebody have some fun around here?’ You know?
“Baby Baby” went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became one of your biggest crossover hits. It helped define Heart in Motion. What do you remember about how that all unfolded?
I started working with additional producers, which I’d never done before. I worked with Michael Omartian, I worked with Keith Thomas, he was a writer and a producer, and with Brown. So, Keith Thomas and I wrote “Baby Baby,” and believe it or not, when I presented that record to A&M and to Word, neither one of them knew what to do with it. They said, ‘I don’t think people will accept it.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s just me. I mean, it’s still the same girl. I’m not lying. I’m just singing about other things.’ And they suggested, ‘Maybe we could brown bag the first single.’
What does that mean?
Brown bag means to have it unidentified. To send a song out to radio stations without any artist ID, because people love labels, and they identify what something is. Through no fault of my own, somebody at a radio station in Southern California heard the song “Baby Baby” and put it on the air without the record company knowing, and the phone lit up. So, it started with this one radio station, and then spread, because it was a fun song. Whatever’s happened musically was generated firstly by what I needed. And I guess audiences kind of said, ‘Well, hey, I could use some of that, too. I’ll take a serving of that.’
What was going on in your life when you wrote “Baby Baby”?
Man, I was at a time in my life where I was so ready for some fun. I’m off the therapist chair, you know. It’s just like, yeah, life is hard on a lot of levels. We all have to work hard, but there’s something about hanging out with a kid, and I’d given birth to one, and was pregnant with another. If you can’t laugh with a child… I mean, it’s just like, oh my gosh, everything was new again. The brilliant music came from Keith Thomas. I’ve always primarily been a lyricist. I mean, I can write music, but I tend to work best if somebody gives me an idea for music. Keith, he had the [imitates beat], and I thought that it was so great. He’d given me that music, but I was writing during the back half of my pregnancy with my daughter, Millie. And he kept saying, ‘This should be a love song, this should be a love song.’ And just, happy. And when you’re nine months pregnant, it’s like… I just couldn’t wrap my head around what he was asking me to do. So, she was just a few weeks old, and I was taking her out of the car. I was going to the kitchen, and I was listening… I’m sure I had some kind of player in the car, and I was like, ‘Oh, Keith, okay, okay, I can write this, I can write this.’ And I just walked in the kitchen and sat her car seat down on the kitchen counter. And I mean, it was like, ‘Of course it’s a love song.’ And the lyrics just tumbled out. And I thought, don’t overthink it. Just sing it to this little nugget. Just a few weeks old.
Heart in Motion had such a strong run of songs —“Every Heartbeat,” “That’s What Love Is For,” “Good for Me.” Is there one song on that record that has a story that stands out to you?
There’s a song on that record called “I Will Remember You.” Okay, so there was an opportunity to have a song in one of the Karate Kid movies, because of “Glory of Love.” I had that Peter Cetera connection. Maybe it was Michael Omartian… he sent the script, and there was a scene in the script that’s kind of like the climax, or the high point, and then kind of the denouement. After that was gonna be all these flashbacks, and they needed a song for it. And we were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll write that song.’ But in the writing of it, it just wound up that the publishers of the movie wanted all the publishing rights, and for those of us that were songwriters, we already had publishers, so we couldn’t do that. So, the song didn’t wind up in the movie.
So what did the song become for you?
At the same time of writing that, one of my, sort of, patron saints for me was my Aunt Jean. She was actually my great aunt, but she was almost the same age as my dad, who was her nephew. She was my grandmother’s youngest sister. The first time I ever did a show, I was 17 years old, at Lakeside Amusement Park in Denver, Colorado. Jean flew from Santa Barbara to be there. Jean was not a person of faith, and she had struggled with alcoholism, and she was in a recovery community, but she… just the letters she would write me. She would say, ‘I feel my resistance to God soften when you sing.’ And then she was dying. I went to visit her several times at the end of her life, and, you know, I’m, like, crushing her pills. We’re going through all of her things from her life, and all those memories are so precious to me. It was important. That song became my way to remember her. So, even for the writer, it’s like music finds its own landing spot for everybody, even if you wrote it. You might have written it like, ‘This was strictly a writing session. It had nothing to do with any… we were just trying to get a job done.’ But then it becomes something else. You hope, because when you write a song, you write it and set it free, and you just hope it’ll find somebody that needs it.
That album reached a much wider audience, but also drew fierce criticism from within the Christian community. What was that experience like for you?
Honestly, I knew it was happening, but I didn’t pursue it. I just always feel like everybody… it takes all your energy to live your life. And even today with social media, we only have so much resource of time, and energy, and mental bandwidth. And I don’t know, I’m not wired in a way that… I’m curious about what people think, but I’m not very curious about what people think about me. Because it doesn’t really matter. I mean, people are gonna think what they think.
So where did you choose to put your focus instead?
I thought, well… music just has to find its own audience. And the thing that was weird for me was, when I first started singing, when I was 15, I would sing one of my Jesus songs. This was, like, the very first time I ever sang when I was a sophomore in high school, and then I would sing a Carole King song. Then I’d sing one of my songs, and then I’d sing a Joni Mitchell tune, because to me, life is everything. It’s falling in love, it’s breaking trust with a friend because you told a secret, and learning the awful lesson, or a beautiful lesson, a really hard way by not keeping a confidence. It’s praying a prayer at night. I mean, it’s all of it, and to me, music about faith always made the most sense in the context of all of life.
Did you feel tension around that view within the industry?
I actually had a conversation with Dan Johnson, who was one of the heads of Word Records, and he had come by the studio. I can’t remember what we were working on, but I said, ‘Dan, I’m afraid I’m not fulfilling the mission of Word Records, because I want to include songs that aren’t specifically faith songs, but they’re all life.’ And he said, ‘Amy, Jesus talked in stories, and a lot of times, people had no idea what he was talking about. But that’s how he chose to communicate.’ And he said, ‘If you want to communicate in stories, go right ahead.’ In his elder years, he’s still alive, he wrote me and said, ‘You were asking my permission, but I’ve never thanked you for stretching me as well.’ I think that the field did have kind of a narrower view of what’s appropriate to say. And because I didn’t grow up having a lot of CCM records, that wasn’t my go-to. I wasn’t shunning it, that just wasn’t the lane I was born in. But life… life is everything. Let’s sing about it.
You and country legend Vince Gill have been together for a long time. 26 years. With two busy careers and public lives, what has helped your marriage stay grounded over the years?
It’s funny, because our youngest says, ‘I want a relationship like you and Dad have.’ And I go, ‘Well, we’ve been in the rock tumbler a long time.’ I mean, Vince will joke and tease that part of the reason we get along so well is that we spend so much time apart. But I think marriage is challenging for everybody. And I think what always drew me to Vince was just that he leads with kindness. I grew up sort of wanting to talk through everything. Let’s talk through it, let’s talk through it, you know? Especially if we’re at other sides of the table. And it was really a challenge for me, with him, because he would say, ‘I’ve never regretted something I didn’t say.’ And there’s sometimes, you know, we’ve disagreed, and it’s like, ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I just need some space.’ But I think because we married later in life... I was 39, in my 40th year, and he was about to turn 43. And I think that we, of necessity, had a great deal of respect for the life that he had lived before I was part of it. And that I had lived before him. Every day, our life winds up being, in some part, the sum of our choices. And how we use our time, our energy, our talent, our resources, all those things, and their time, you know. I love the way he thinks. And to me, even when I don’t agree with him, I respect his thought process.
That’s beautifully said. There’s a lot of wisdom in that. Your new album The Me That Remains, is your first in over a decade. What led you to this record at this point in your life?
Just as far as a music backdrop, I never quit touring. I mean, COVID shut everybody down, but I’ve kept up a nice balance of touring, 75, 80 shows a year. That never stopped. I’ve worked with the same band for a long time. I love it. And probably for the last 15 years, promoters have just sold, ‘An Evening with Amy Grant,’ at lovely theaters. And it’s been great. But just the experience in my own life… In the summer of 2022, I had a really horrific bike accident, and it required a lot of recovery, and then two subsequent surgeries after that because of the wreck. At the end of May 2024, I was gonna go through a battery of tests with a neuropsychologist from Vanderbilt Hospital, because when somebody’s had a head injury, after a certain amount of healing, they want a baseline going forward. So, you know, hours of testing, and then I went back for the results, and two of the results were in the 90th percentile. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, yes!’ And one result was in the 20th percentile.
For which area?
Processing. So, memory and vocabulary were 90, and processing was in the 20th percentile. And I was like, ‘Ah, that’s what it is.’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘I feel like everything’s happening in a room down the hall. And that I just can’t participate the same way.’ It’s great that I get to go on the road, because I figure out what I’m gonna say, and I’ve got the same songs over and over, and repetition is so good for healing. But I said, ‘I just feel myself pulling back everywhere.’ And I said, ‘Will you test me again? Like, in a few years?’ He said, ‘Yeah, just tell me when you want to come back.’ That was May of 2024. But the doctor said, ‘I want to tell you something. This is just life advice, but it’s medical advice, too.’ And I said, ‘Tell me.’ He said, ‘You said that you’re having a tendency to pull back. Amy, lean in.’ And so, you know, part of my experience with doing this record was I was leaning in for my benefit. And a couple of songs were older songs, but I was just having a creative experience with myself writing the lyrics to “The Me That Remains.”
That song feels like it comes from a very personal place.
I haven’t written songs in a long time, and it wasn’t even like, ‘I’m gonna do a record, I want to write some songs.’ I just was reaching for, ‘What are the tools that have pulled me out of the ditch before?’ and it wasn’t that I couldn’t tour, it wasn’t that I couldn’t perform a set list, but it was just my day-to-day. And when that doctor said, ‘lean in,’ I just reached for things that had helped me in the past. And I thought, ‘Gosh, that song is so specific to me,’ but the first person I shared it with, they went, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s my life.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, music is doing what it’s always done!’ It’s connecting us to each other, to our own story, too.
How are you feeling now?
I feel great. I set alarms for everything. I still have short-term memory issues, but now my friends go, ‘Hey, I didn’t have to hit my head, and I can’t remember anything.’
That’s all of us at this age.
Yes, and so I kind of go, ‘It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t even matter what the details are. We all wake up every day, and we’ve got the choice, how am I gonna treat myself? How am I going to treat others?’ I mean, the gospel, in a nutshell: Jesus said, ‘Love God, love each other.’ Everything falls under that. And so I go, ‘Okay, that’s pretty simple. I can remember that.’
You’ve lived such a full life already. A long successful career, a beautiful marriage, motherhood. What still feels like it’s unfolding for you?
A project that I have in the short run is I’ve planted a pretty substantial garden at a farm that I’ve owned for 30-plus years… it’s a 20-minute drive. It’s been a lot of work, but I thought, ‘I’m 65. Just for one year, I’m gonna try this. One year. I’m gonna plant a big garden.’ I can’t figure out why I’m just working so hard on this garden. Like, this is taking hours, days. And if just one thing, if I can eat one tomato, if I can just have one, it’ll be a success. And I’ve invited different family members to come out, and they’ve helped, different friends, it’s so great having your hands in the dirt. I can’t figure out… who knows, it’s a mystery why anything becomes important to any of us. Like, what makes us go down a path? But I said to Vince, ‘I want to know where a vegetable comes from. I want to know what it feels like — the pace of planting a seed and having it grow and produce, because we don’t live in a natural pace anymore. What do you think about that?’ And he said, ‘I think I would just go to the grocery store and purchase, in about 15 minutes, everything you’re gonna grow all season.’ Oh, he’s so practical! But he celebrates the freedom for me to investigate whatever weird thing is interesting to me at the time.So, right now, I’m making music and gardening. (Laughs)
