She arrived in the late 1970s, a baby-faced, 17-year-old Georgia girl singing Contemporary Christian pop music. Over the decades, Amy Grant won 22 Dove Awards and six Grammys, all of them for her Christian and gospel recordings.
Grant, who’ll perform with her band Sunday at Clearwater’s Capitol Theatre, began expanding her musical vocabulary in the ‘80s, with well-crafted pop crossover material, although never abandoning her faith nor her roots in Christian and gospel. To date, she has sold a cumulative 30 million albums and has over 2.2 billion global streams.
A few more fast facts: Grant was a Kennedy Center honoree in 2022; she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; her semi-annual Christmas tours with husband Vince Gill are across-the-board sellouts.
An ambassador for the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women movement, she performed at the “Red Dress Collection” concert Jan. 29 at Lincoln Center. Grant sang her hits “Baby Baby,” “That’s What Love is For” and “Every Heartbeat,” along with the title track from her upcoming album, The Me That Remains.
The album was produced by longtime Jimmy Buffett compadre Mac McAnally and will be released May 8 by Thirty Tiger Records. Check that title: The Me That Remains is especially significant for Grant, 65, because it’s her first full collection of new music since the 2022 Nashville bicycle accident that nearly killed her.
Just two years prior, she’d undergone open-heart surgery to repair a congenital condition.
So here’s Amy Grant, back on the upswing, and telling the Catalyst she’s feeling great about her life’s journey so far.
St. Pete Catalyst: When the health issues happened, did you think ‘Well, these are career-enders’?
Amy Grant: I could not have been more shocked that a doctor said I needed open-heart surgery. But I didn’t dread it. I didn’t think about it. I thought, I’m just gonna live every day. Covid set in, and it was a while before the hospitals opened up for elective surgery. That’s what they called it. I thought well, I’m electing to live! Does that count?
I honestly didn’t try to wrap my head around it until the night before, and I was having to wash myself with this blue soap. And then I got a little nervous and I thought well, you know what, it’s gonna pass just like every 24 hours passes. And it’ll be what it’ll be. And I did, and I recovered from that.
Actually, it was just getting over the entry wound. The entry wound was like getting hit by a truck. But my life was better afterwards, because I didn’t realize how compromised my oxygen level was in my blood, and had been from the time I was a child.
So I was grateful to have something that could be fixed.
You had a severe brain injury from the bike accident. That must have been scary.
Yeah, yeah. That has been a long recovery. The first 18 months, that was the most dramatic. But you know, you just have what you have when you wake up in a day. I just kind of found my footing, little by little, and things still continue to improve. I’m so grateful, the last six months, for my balance is better.
To me, the great reminder is, everybody is in recovery – of some kind [laughing].
The Me That Remains will be your first album in 13 years. Was it nice to take that time off, and work whenever you felt like it?
I have toured pretty consistently. One thing I love about the world of creativity is, everything comes in seasons. There’s a season of songwriting, then that overlaps with a season of recording. Or a season of touring. And that’s just the work part of life. I’m part of a large extended family, and that kind of has its own rhythms.
But I never stopped touring. I mean, there was a big shutdown with Covid, but I probably toured 80 cities after Covid, and then I had that accident and everything was on hold again. But I probably do 80 shows a year, which is not a lot, but it’s enough for me to get to enjoy all that, and still have other parts of life that matter as well but are not as public.
There were many years when I was putting out music routinely, and I had small kids. It felt like I was drinking out of a firehose. It really did. And no, life does not go that way now.
You look at young parents, with three kids under 6, and you just go ‘Life will not always feel this way. Someday, you can have a clean house … not now.’ [laughing]. But there are those seasons in life for everybody. When there’s not enough mental space; all of life feels like Whack-a-Mole, you know? You’re just trying to deal with the next thing that’s popping up, and you don’t know where it’s coming from.
You recorded these songs sporadically over time, two or three at a session. Was it always going to be an album?
We did the third session, and Mac said ‘Girl, I think we got a record.’ I said ‘Great – I wish I had a record deal.’ It was so much fun to just let something unfold in real time. No deadlines. Life can’t be that way, I don’t think – we all need the pressure at times to get out of bed and put one foot in front of the other.
Because you started out in Christian music, and continue to record in that genre sometimes, I wondered: Was pop stardom something you sought, or did it just happen organically?
It just happened organically. I love the experience of music, and this sounds weird coming out of my mouth: It’s enough for me to just get to participate privately, like just working on guitar, for me … I’m not an accomplished musician … music, whether you’re working on it at home or on a stage, it’s the same feel-good.
And the beautiful thing about touring with a band is, everybody’s bringing what they bring. Whatever that massage is in your brain when you’re creating music, or playing something, it feels good alone or with people. I’ve loved that from the time I was young.
There are still people not happy with you because you went into more secular music. I figure it was just part of your journey.
Yeah, like everybody’s life is so unique. Everybody’s. And this was my unique life, the people I met, the work relationships, the twists and tuns in the story of my own life. I mean, everybody’s life is a full-time adventure.
Tell us about the show you and your band are bringing to Clearwater Sunday.
For the past 15 years, because I’ve had so little new music, every time I go on the road I try to just re-invent the set list. Especially in the last five years, I want to sing songs I haven’t sung in a long time. I try to pick from every chapter of my musical life. Because it’s the songs that are bringing us together.
So I sing songs from the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, late ‘80s, ‘90s … and I’m like woo-hoo! I actually have something new, now, to play for people. Not that anybody ever cares about new music; what you love about a show is knowing the song that the artist is singing – ‘oh, that reminds me of Spring Break my senior year,’ ‘oh, that reminds me of a road trip’ – so nobody’s holding their breath waiting for new music. But it’s fun for me.
Find tickets for Sunday’s 7:30 p.m. concert at this link.