The Tennessean
May 5, 2002
By SANDY SMITH
The spring day is bright and sunny. The sky couldn't be more blue and the clouds more bleached-laundry white. The manicured grass couldn't be greener. The landscaper couldn't be planting flowers any more vibrant. And Chester the dog couldn't be a more perfect shade of brown.
All the colors of the world could not be making their presence any more known than on this particular day.
And this is where life finds a 41-year-old Amy Grant these days, literally and figuratively. Five years ago, her career was dipping, her marriage was failing and her personal life was the subject of much tabloid scrutiny. But now, things are looking a lot brighter.
Today, from the back porch of her Belle Meade home - the one that she's shared with husband Vince Gill for about 18 months yet still hasn't had time to hang curtains in - she reflects on a palette of memories few could imagine, and talks about colors.
Another day, another place once found Grant having a different conversation about color. Pregnant with her third child, she had gone to visit Sarah Cannon (Minnie Pearl) in an assisted-living facility to ask permission to name her daughter after her.
Stilted by a stroke but having an incredibly lucid day, Cannon dropped one of her many pearls of wisdom. This one would become something of a lifeline for the hard days ahead.
''She started talking about things I should do with the children,'' Grant said. ''And we started talking about painting and light and dark and clouds. All of a sudden, she laid out such a gem. I asked her what her favorite color was, and she said black.
''I'm thinking 'black?' And she said, 'Without black, nothing has any depth. It's when you mix black with every other color that you can create fullness and shape.' That completely bowled me over. I've thought about it so many times.
''That's how life feels right now. It feels like it has a lot of depth.''
But before the colors could become so deep, there would be a strong infusion of black into Amy Grant's seemingly perfect life.
Gold 'n' platinum girl
Grant was born into the prominent Burton family, which owned the land that later became the sprawling Burton Hills development just south of Green Hills. Her father was a physician. She went to Harpeth Hall, a private, upscale all-girls school where, in the mid-'70s, the girls attended mandatory chapel. It was a far cry from her church.
''My youth group experience at Belmont Church was so real and alive and it felt like we were experiencing God where the rubber met the road,'' Grant said. ''And in our youth group there were kids with drug problems, people whose parents couldn't pay the rent. Learning about God seemed so vital and so necessary to surviving life.
''Then I'd sit in these chapel services at school and I thought I was hearing someone's political agenda. Or even worse, it was boring.''
She did what any idealistic teen might do: write songs and perform them at chapel services. In an interview as she was making her first waves in Christian music, she would say that she had done so because she thought ''God needed better PR'' at the school.
Reminded of that quote, she laughed. ''That was awfully presumptuous. I certainly screwed that one up.''
But her attempts to boost God's image at her school were enough to draw the attention of her youth pastor, Brown Bannister, leading to a record deal after Bannister played her songs to an executive at Word Records.
Grant recorded her first album, and a year later when it was released in the fledgling contemporary Christian market, she became the first contemporary Christian artist to sell enough to earn a gold record.
She juggled high school and then college (first at Furman, then Vanderbilt, where she dropped out shy of a degree) with touring and albums. She married Gary Chapman, the songwriter who had written My Father's Eyes, a song that would become a Grant standard.
Along the way, she helped propel the Christian music industry into popular overdrive. In the early '80s, Life magazine called her ''the Madonna of gospel rock,'' while The New York Times named her ''the Michael Jackson of gospel music.''
An industry was beginning to boom, and much of it rode on the shoulders of a Nashville girl with a guitar.
Her sixth album, Age to Age, went platinum, as did the five albums that followed. In 1991, Heart in Motion sold 5 million copies and earned her four Grammy nominations in pop categories, including the biggies: record, song and album of the year, much of the success due to the bouncy song Baby, Baby.
It was a time Grant now calls the ''top of the bell curve of my success.''
The albums that followed were successful, selling 2 million and 3 million copies each. But in 1997, things began to unravel. After the pop styles of Heart in Motion, Behind the Eyes, her 15th album, was darker. She'd later refer to it as ''Prozac and razorblades.'' It would reach gold sales of 500,000, but it was the first time since 1982 that a new Amy Grant album hadn't gone platinum.
From the outside, it would seem the career slide might have stemmed from a meltdown in her personal life. In 1999, her marriage to Chapman ended in divorce, and rumors of an improper relationship with Gill heated up the tabloids. But she points to a derailing in her record label, A&M, and the sale of her management company, which led to the forced resignations of her longtime managers, Mike Blanton and Dan Harrell.
Grant, who had recorded 15 albums in 20 years, was sidetracked.
''All of my emotional energy was going somewhere besides recording. I'd had so many continental shifts in my life. I wasn't ready to process that in song. It just felt like I was cheapening it,'' she said.
''I actually recorded a few songs that were ear candy that I was not proud of, just to try to get something going. From a creative standpoint, I felt completely shell-shocked and very quiet.''
Gray day, glimmer of hope
Just before leaving on the Behind the Eyes tour, Grant reached a point where she had a ''crisis of faith.''
''I remember asking two preachers who were visiting in our home if they believed that God really did heal,'' she said. ''I was a total mess. I just felt so broken on the inside. I just remember thinking either God can heal me on some level or I'm going to completely disappear.''
Parenting her three children wasn't easy, either. ''I was so ashamed, trying to talk to my kids about faith.''
But the woman who admits to a tendency to ''wave the pompons harder and cheer louder'' during hard times found touring a welcome escape.
''I was gone for four months,'' she said. ''It really was a relief to get out there.''
Still, she says she probably talked less during her concerts than before. Instead, she spent hours alone, reading the Bible and praying, both of which maybe weren't the best thing.
''Sometimes when I felt most out of sorts in my own skin and in the environment I found myself, I read my Bible voraciously. I found that I kept removing myself, seeking alone time and praying,'' she said. ''What I feel right now is that our faith really reveals itself in the context of interacting with other people.''
That same year, Grant and Chapman took their children to Sarasota, Fla., for spring break, staying in separate houses with the children splitting time between them.
Finding herself alone one day, she went for a walk on Lido Beach, a place she knew well because her parents had owned a house there since she was young.
On that really gray day, Grant was walking into the wind with the crushed shells beneath her feet.
''I remember thinking, 'God, all I want is to feel whole again. I want Gary to be whole. Help.' ''
She walked until she reached a seawall and was about to turn back.
''I was just saying that and I looked down and there was a little sand dollar about the size of a quarter, whole. Right past me, I saw a shell called sunset and it was whole. Then I saw a tiny whelk, whole. I had not moved, and they were all around me.
''Then I saw a princess slipper. I picked that up. The crowning moment was when I saw two tiger paws still connected. I used to collect them, but I'd never seen them connected. I didn't see any more whole shells.
''I didn't have an answer for my life. It wasn't until September that I told Gary that I was going to leave and we went through all this counseling until the end of December, when we told the kids. But I felt like my voice had been heard.''
She took the shells back to the beach house, wrapped them in cotton, put them in a box with the date marked on it and stuck them in a drawer.
Her parents sold the beach house last fall and in cleaning it out, her sister found that box of cotton-wrapped shells, with the date written on it.
The passing of time since those shells were first put away has brought many lessons.
''I've learned so much about life and about myself,'' Grant says. ''When you are going through a hard time, you have a tendency to paint the good guys and the bad guys when you feel unsure about what you're doing. In my need to justify all these shaky steps I was taking, I was painting everybody in black hats or white hats.
''Life is not that way. There's good in everybody. There's bad in everybody.''
And she's learned another thing, the answer to the question she asked the visiting pastors those years ago: Does God heal?
''I can say today I absolutely believe he does. I feel like I really believe in God's forgiveness. I experientially believe in his mercy. I know like I never knew before that he takes us right where we are.''
Looking back
It would be easy at this point to paint rosy colors, ones with no hints of darkness, but Grant is firmly in reality. Painting a fairy-tale ending to her life isn't where she is, or even where she wants to pretend to be anymore.
''Life is not tied up in a neat bow,'' she said. ''Vince and I did not ride off into the sunset. We're still people.''
That said, life looks pretty good. Gill sweeps onto the back porch and kisses his wife goodbye before heading out to a Country Music Foundation board meeting. ''He's wearing a jacket,'' she gushes. ''He never wears a jacket.''
Married since 2000, Gill has helped bring about much of the changes in Grant's life.
''There are things that because of my relationship with Vince and because of how secure I feel in his love, I'm starting to see things about myself that maybe in my earlier life when I didn't feel so secure, I wasn't able to take a look at myself and go, 'You are really squirrelly in this area. Let's just keep growing in this area.'
''Feeling loved is an amazing thing. Part of it is a combination of actually being loved and being able to receive love.''
Inside, baby Corinna, born last year and now possessing the biggest brown eyes, is learning to crawl up a few steps. The baby has helped blend the two new families - Grant's three children and Gill's daughter - into one.
''One thing about a baby, it kind of brings everybody in a little bit,'' Grant said. ''That's not why we had her. But it's fun for us to see how she develops. They'll go, 'She said my name.' She's just so easygoing and lovable.''
With family life on a definite upswing and a new album out, Grant pauses to mark her 25th year in contemporary Christian music. Any regrets?
''I don't know that I have one. I haven't had a bird's-eye view of all this. I remember reading about writing and it told the story of a rabbit. If you were writing from the rabbit's viewpoint, it wouldn't be, 'Well, I was going through the field to the barn.' It would be 'panting, panting, panting, grass in my face, panting, panting, panting.'
''Life is experiential. You don't get a chance in life to really look back. What you get is 'grass in the face, grass in the face, panting.' ''
And yet, there are times when things force her to look at the impact she has had on the lives of many. She has long been a supporter of various charities, including Vanderbilt Children's Hospital, Habitat for Humanity and Compassion International, a program that has recording artists urge sponsorship for children in other countries. And, at one point, she had a large youth group in her barn, calling the program The Loft.
''A month doesn't go by when one or two people don't come up to me and say, 'I'm sponsoring a child through Compassion.' Or 'I used to come to youth group at the Loft.' It's just the ripple effect of having done something for a very long time. That's the good stuff.''
And despite her national name recognition, most of her good deeds have been done in her hometown.
''I guess it's because it's what I see,'' she said. ''I have realized there is not some mysterious mass of people who make things happen. It's moms and dads, men and women with full-time jobs who work hard and make a little extra time to do something.
''When you're younger and you come from a more privileged background, I think you think things just happen. I thought breakfast just appeared on the table, that laundry just shows up clean in my drawer. But then you get out on your own and you panic the first time there's no toilet paper and I was the one who was supposed to buy it.''
Still, Grant isn't one to just write a check or make an appearance at a charity event. At times, she has become her own charitable institution, linking those in need with those who have.
Recently, she met a single mother with a little girl at the Nashville Public Library. The woman had been thinking about applying for a Habitat for Humanity house, and she took running into Grant as a sign to do so. A week later, Grant got a check in the mail from a sales clerk who had received a large bonus. The note said, '''I thought you might know where to help me put this.'' A few phone calls later, the woman in the library had several thousand dollars toward her Habitat house.
''That is so much more interesting to me than record sales,'' Grant said. ''Kids who would sit down and start telling you everything about why their parents hate them. Or somebody opening up enough to tell you what their hopes and dreams were. That doesn't stop when your career does. People still come up to you and remember what you did in their lives.''
And all of that fits within Grant's definition of happiness: ''To feel like you belong. To feel like you matter, not for what you can do, but for who you are to somebody. To experience occasional waves of passion toward something like an activity, not necessarily work.
''It's not about feeling happy, but understanding a sense of purpose in saying, 'However mundane this moment seems, on a real basic level, it was a pleasure to God to create me. He ultimately has my good in mind.' ''
Getting there
Amy Grant and Vince Gill serve as hosts for the third annual Aerus Electrolux Challenge this week at Legends Club of Tennessee. More than 140 of the best LPGA golfers will take their shot at the $800,000 in prizes.
The event kicks off Tuesday with the Vinny Pro-Celebrity invitational, which raises money for junior golf. It's capped with a concert featuring Grant and Gill at the golf course's driving range. Tickets for that event are included with most Electrolux tickets.
Wednesday's action includes an LPGA pro-am, with tee times at 7 a.m., and the first round of the LPGA begins Thursday with the finals set for Sunday. ESPN will cover the event live Friday-Sunday.
Tickets for the Electrolux are $10 for a one-day pass (which does not include admission to the concert) or $50 for a grounds ticket for all the week's events. Skybox and clubhouse tickets also are available. For information, call 790-7755.
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