Bio : Amy Grant
Amy Grant has had an illustrious career — in some ways, four careers in one. She was integral in building Contemporary Christian Music, established a successful place in pop music, solidified herself as a Christmas music icon, all while keeping her artistry as a singer-songwriter as a throughline to her work. With her newest album, The Me That Remains, Grant is diving deeper than ever into the singer-songwriter side of herself, centering creativity, introspection and self-expression.
A "creative overachiever" (Billboard), "music icon" (The Tennessean) and "beloved voice" (Wall Street Journal), as well as a six-time GRAMMY winner, the source of numerous gold and platinum records and a vast catalog of celebrated hits, Grant has built a legacy meant to last along with a devoted, diverse community of fans. But fifty years into Grant's pioneering career, the singer-songwriter is still digging — excavating and elevating truths about herself, her community and the world on the sweeping, vulnerable The Me That Remains (out May 8th via Thirty Tigers), her first new collection of original songs in over a decade produced by ten-time CMA Award winner and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Mac McAnally.
"I love the shared history the catalogue represents for me and my audience," Grant says. "But right now, life feels more expansive than it did when I first sang those songs. In the summer of 2024, I started thinking, 'Wouldn't it be fun to write and sing about what life looks like now?'"
Musically and lyrically, the album is an ambitious, genre-agnostic exploration of healing and uplift showcasing both Grant's singing and songwriting prowess and her endless empathy for her listeners. Her past few years have been transformative, in ways both exciting and deeply challenging. Open heart surgery in the middle of 2020's COVID-19 pandemic lockdown was followed by a devastating bike accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury. "Really, the trajectory of my life changed after that," as she puts it. Then, in 2023, Grant had a procedure to remove a cyst on her vocal cords. The Me That Remains, then, is meant both literally and figuratively — Grant's physical, emotional and spiritual journey through those health scares and the larger tumult of the 2020s compelled her to create, irrevocably shaping this release.
“I didn’t set out to make an album of songs," Grant says. "I started with recording a few songs which turned into a few more songs, and before I knew it, we had enough for a full album. I had a small cheering section with my immediate team, but there wasn’t a label deadline to meet and that created exploration and fun. It just emerged very naturally, one step at a time." As much as the album is the product of Grant's decade-honed talents, it still entailed stepping outside her comfort zone. "I feel like this project freed me from expectations that I didn't even know I had," she says.
Across the ten tracks, listeners will hear a portrait of Grant today — artist, first and foremost, an observer, but also wife, mother, sister, daughter and citizen, as she tracks what it means to move through tragedy and into light with characteristic emotion and depth, whether those trials are deeply intimate or societal. She commissioned artist Wayne Brezinka to create a mixed media piece for the cover of The Me That Remains, for which Brezinka spent several days with Grant gathering materials of significance to her. Pieces of a favorite quilt, a seashells collection, her childhood bible, and an article about her grandfather are just a few of the fragments that make up the rich collage portrait. Giving them up to Brezinka's art "required a lot of release from me," as Grant puts it — a release that echoes the transformative letting go Grant found as she put the album together. Healing, growing and reflecting, Grant found herself shedding ideas and imagined rules that didn't serve her, and more than anything else, her sky-high expectations for herself.
The Me That Remains opens with the album's first single, "The 6th of January (Yasgur's Farm)" — a bold track that connects protest movements of the '60s (hence the reference to Max Yasgur's farm, the site of Woodstock) and before to the ongoing fight for justice today, all while zooming out to consider how best to move through a period of chaos towards unity. "We're experiencing history as it happens," says Grant. "Nobody has the big picture, and it's vital that we can sit in unrest without jumping to conclusions of how it can all be fixed. That starts within ourselves."
The anthemic, anguished but ultimately hopeful "How Do We Get There From Here," a duet and co-write with Ruby Amanfu almost functions as a response to "The 6th." Where the first track is about how it often feels as though society has lost its way, "How" is an urgent call for answers, for finding a path to justice and peace. Grant composed the song with Amanfu in the wake of the 2023 Covenant school shooting in Nashville, in which a former student killed three children and three adults. She had just visited the Tennessee capitol alongside a coalition of other artists to discuss gun control reform, and was sitting at home reflecting on the tragedy and her own experience, trying to prevent more tragedies when the song came to her: urgent and timely, demanding answers without prescribing them. Grant describes the song's title and refrain as "an invitation," meant to bring people into the fold rather than alienating them. "You're creating a space to welcome somebody in with creativity," she says. "Shared on a song, it's there forever."
The uplifting tune "Please Don't Make Me Beg" shows the ties between the personal and political — "a plea to see the humanity in each of us, no matter who you are, no matter what you've done," as Grant puts it, whether it's a man on a street corner "singing out his gladness" or a lover. She co-wrote the song with Switchfoot frontman Jon Foreman years ago, and it's been a fan favorite and requested song ever since a YouTube video of the song was posted years ago from a Bluebird Cafe performance.
On "The Saint" and "Beautiful Lone Companion," Grant mines the strength of her spirituality for new meaning in very different ways. "The Saint," inspired by two real-life sisters Grant knows well, hinges on a single, radical idea: "Amy, sometimes I wonder if the addicts aren't the real saints," said one, a nun, of her sister who had long struggled with addiction. "I don't know that I would have had the guts to say that myself," Grant says. "But I thought, the first action of love is to see — not to fix, to see." For the profound, evocative ballad "Beautiful Love Companion," she modified a composition by country songwriting legend Mike Reid so gracefully that he told her, "I believe this is what the song was always meant to be" — a compliment that moved her to tears.
The title track is a beautiful homage to the personal challenge and triumph of a healing journey, inspired by both the months of recovery from her bike accident and literally learning to sing again after her vocal cord surgery. The emotional core of the album, it describes how the hardest challenges often show us who we really are, honing our truest, best selves as we work through them. "How much of our lives do we spend projecting ourselves into the future, obsessing over what's next?" Grant asks. "There's something about the recovery process — it's essential to be in the moment you're in, to say, 'Where's the next step?' and relish that."
The Me That Remains concludes, fittingly, with tributes to Grant's family: A duet with husband Vince Gill, "Friend Like You," and a collaboration with her daughters Sarah and Corrina (recorded in the Grant-Gill family's home studio) inspired by the passing of Grant's mother, "The Other Side of Goodbye." "I'm so glad Vince put the studio in our home, because it just adds to the memories of the bones of this old house," says Grant.
The album spans the most harrowing challenges and the brightest optimism, bridged with Grant's gentle, familiar and effortless singing. Nothing is trivial, but it is beautiful in its depth — a slice of Grant's life and perspective that will bring listeners new and old a little further into her world. "There are fewer bells and whistles around this deeper work now, but life’s discoveries and mysteries are even more compelling to me," says Grant. "I’m thankful for each day and curious to find connection and purpose, and how the love that made us all will emerge and express itself in and through me today.”