Amy Grant on the Gift of Showing Up in the Music

For Amy Grant, there’s no source of healing quite as powerful as music. She experienced this first hand when Christian singer Cory Asbury invited her to sing on his soon-to-be-released song,“These Are the Days (That We’ll Want Back).” Grant was recovering from throat surgery that forced her to delay the recording process, but Asbury and team waited for Grant to be ready, knowing that the song meant just as much to her as it did them. “I was so moved by the song, I was choked up trying to sing it,” Grant recalls to American Songwriter. “It was such a reminder of how we’re all wired uniquely. But I am so moved by music, it fills my reservoir.” 

The session left Grant with a thought-provoking question on her mind: “What is it about music that really affects us?”

“What I see is that showing up is the gift,” Grant continues about her current state of mind. “In creativity, showing up to sing on that song, that is a gift. I’m writing a lot because to me, once you know what you’re going to say, or when you have an idea of what you want to say, then you just have to find the path to get there.”

For Grant, that path is carved from the simple yet real moments in her life that she’s now weaving together to tell a heartfelt story through song. She put this method to the test when she got into the room with hit songwriters Barry Dean and Natalie Hemby, the latter of whom Grant has known most of her life. Having met Hemby when she was 6 years old—Hemby’s father played guitar in Grant’s band and her mother has been her personal assistant for more than 35 years—Grant has had the joy of watching her grow into one of Nashville’s most prolific songwriters. But the first day they wrote together ended in disappointment. 

“We came up with a couple of songs that were OK, but none of us really felt captured by them,” Grant describes.

But after a therapy session with her eldest daughter, Gloria, Grant knew she had a song brewing inside of her. “I called Natalie and Barry and said, ‘Can we get together again?’ I knew exactly what I wanted to say,” Grant says. “Natalie sat down at the piano and she said, ‘Just tell me the picture you’re wanting to paint.’” 

As Grant began talking, Hemby started writing, encouraging Grant that she was merely “speaking the lyric.” That writing session led to such lines as We must look like a couple of strangers / Sitting in a quiet room / You’ve been studying the patterns on the carpet / I’ve been studying you / You kept building higher walls / I kept busting through / We’ve been on this same road together / But somehow got a different view. Those words became one of Grant’s new songs, “What You Heard,” a gentle acoustic ballad about a mother trying to reach out to her daughter that helped reinvigorate her confidence as a songwriter. 

“I really was so grateful for the time spent with them, because if you haven’t written in a while, I felt myself being intimidated by the process,” Grant says of writing with Hemby and Dean. “Any one of us can have the ability to do something, but we’re not accustomed to doing it alone. [Hemby] said, ‘This is why you’ve been a songwriter your whole life. It’s all in there.’”

The song serves as a full circle moment, as the daughter it’s written about is the same one who inspired Grant’s biggest hit, “Baby, Baby.” Released in 1991, “Baby, Baby” was written as a message of love with the sweetest of devotionto her then 6-week-old daughter. The song topped both the BillboardHot 100 and Adult Contemporary charts. But before she could send “What You Heard” into the world, Grant knew she had to share it with her daughter first. 

“I said, ‘I’m about to start singing this song; it came from our therapy session.’ I sat on the floor with my guitar and I said, ‘I’ve got to sing this to you to get your permission,’” Grant reflects. “It’s interesting, within the same relationship, there’s so many different chapters and so many different lenses that you can see that relationship. I felt that the feeling that we captured in that moment, that really mattered for me to be able to articulate. I love the process of songwriting because it really is just intentional conversation.” 

Grant is now making a point to have intentional conversations through her music, having gone through a series of highs and lows over the past year. In July 2022, she endured a bike accident that left her unconscious for 10 minutes and with a concussion that she says she’s still on the “long road to recovery” from. Months later, the music icon was one of five distinguished honorees at the 2022 Kennedy Center Honors alongside U2, George Clooney, Gladys Knight, and Tania León.

The singer is in the process of working on an album that will be her first in a decade since How Mercy Looks From Here (2013) became her 12th album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Top Christian Albums chart. Grant admits that she doesn’t know why there’s been such a long pause between releases, yet guesses it may have to do with her desire to take life one step at a time.

“One thing I know about myself, I am slow like a sunrise,” she says. “I don’t know why I’ve taken such a long break. Maybe the imposed simplification of my life last year gave me a chance to say, ‘What’s the stuff that really matters to me?’ I have an opportunity to sing, especially to my peer group. Because I’ve never stopped touring; I watched my audience age with me, so as a creative person, it feels crazy to not take advantage of that opportunity. Just continuing the story and the conversation at this stage in life does feel precious. Every song is just a piece of the conversation.” 

Grant has been having that conversation through her music for more than 40 years. With her feet straddling the worlds of Christian and pop music since she rose to fame in the 1980s, Grant earned the unofficial title of “The Queen of Christian Pop.” While her first seven albums all cracked the Top 15 on the Billboard Top Christian Albums chart, six of which hit No. 1, it wasn’t until Heart in Motion arrived on the scene in 1991 that Grant made the case for herself as a pop artist rooted strongly in Christianity. Its lead single, “Baby, Baby,” made Grant a household name and was a career-defining hit. It also was her first song to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. This paved the way for other singles off the album like “Every Heartbeat” and “Good For Me” to also reach the Top 10 on the all-genre chart. 

Grant has long known that success matures over time, a valuable lesson she learned from an unlikely source. Back in the late 1980s after her grandmother passed away, Grant and her sisters each received an inheritance the equivalent of a couple of house payments. As a woman who was widowed young in her mid-40s, Grant’s grandmother used to fill her time making rolls and homemade jelly. Grant tucked the envelope containing the inheritance check in the silverware drawer in her kitchen at the time, knowing she would use it for something special to honor her grandmother’s memory. 

Before the year’s end, Grant fulfilled that purpose when she used the money to purchase 75 fruit trees to plant in her backyard. Though she was expecting to receive small plants in the mail, what arrived at her doorstep were 24-inch tall sticks she had to plant in the ground by hand. But she didn’t mind the labor, knowing that slowly over time, the trees would one day be fruitful. 

“I love having my hands in the dirt. The rhythm of planting is so unlike everything high speed. It requires built-in patience,” Grant observes. “We planted these trees and then so much happened in the next 20 years.” 

At the time, she was married to her now ex-husband, Christian singer/songwriter Gary Chapman. The two were married for 17 years and had three children before divorcing in 1999. A year later, Grant married Vince Gill. Grant’s patience paid off in the long run when one day she received a phone call from the person who was currently living on the property. 

“They said, ‘I think you planted these fruit trees. A lot of them have fallen down, but our neighbor started keeping bees and for the first time ever, they’re covered in fruit,’” Grant recalls. 

When the singer returned to the place she once called home, she found that the stalks had grown into massive trees, bearing plentiful peaches, pears, and apples. Grant marveled at the growth as she filled baskets full of fruit. The meaning of her work wouldn’t hit her until decades later when producer Marshall Altman shared during a session that he had a song he’d written five years ago with Michael White that he didn’t expect would ever see the light of day. Piquing Grant’s interest, she asked him to play it for her. That song was “Trees We’ll Never See.” 

“I said, ‘Well, that sounds like something I would write,’” Grant says of her reaction. Altman started calling session musicians on the spot, and within 10 days, they had the song finished and recorded. 

“I love everything about that song,” she professes. “Trees take a long time to grow. It’s understood when you plant a tree, you’re making an investment in the future and people that will enjoy it,” she expresses. 

That spirit is captured in such lyrics as, Once those roots take hold / You’ll be just fine / It’s a beautiful design / It just takes love and faith and grace / A little time, the words coming to Grant at the perfect time. 

“That song hit me so much because, in an earlier version of my life, I planted 75 trees. Probably half of them died, but the ones that lasted now for a different family are tall. It was unbelievable,” she expresses. “So when I heard that song, ‘Trees We’ll Never See,’ I thought, ‘I know this firsthand.’ At 62, every investment in something good is worth doing because some things take a long time to emerge. So I loved that song the moment I heard it, and it did fit my life.” 

Grant will continue to expand her roots when she releases Lead Me On Live 1989, a 17-track album recorded live during her 1989 tour in support of her hit 1988 album, Lead Me On, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Christian album chart. The live album features seven songs from Lead Me On, along with five tracks from her 1985 album, Unguarded, that found the Christian star leaning more into pop, particularly with the hit single “Find a Way.” Fans will get to hear other Grant classics on the live project that will be released digitally and on CD, with an anticipated release in late August 2023.

Before 2023 is over, Grant will have played more than 60 tour dates, including a dozen shows at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in December for her annual Christmas at the Ryman residency with Gill. While that sounds like a hefty touring schedule, it symbolizes how Grant’s soul is fueled by music. She proves this by sharing that just before she came to the call, she was playing a string guitar, “croaking” her way through a cover of Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” as her throat continues to heal from surgery. But the struggle merely brought Grant back to center. 

“I thought, ‘I go to music to fill up,’ whether anybody’s listening to me sing, whether it’s a song I write, if anybody listens to it. It hit me—there are a lot of people like me who go to music to fill up,” she proclaims, adding that “there’s hidden gifts in everything.” Grant says she’s currently sitting in the mindset of being “present to yourself and present to the moment and the people in your life.”

She adds, “I’m waiting to let whatever the next step is unfold.”