USA Today
Posted 8/18/2003 7:45 PM Updated 8/18/2003 9:45 PM
By Brian Mansfield, Special for USA TODAY
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"It's not like I feel like the world's holding its breath," says Grant, 42. "I mean, six years between new records, I don't deserve to have any attention at all."
Though Grant's 1991 album, Heart in Motion, which included the hit Baby Baby, sold 5 million copies, her recent albums have done well to go gold. Her last album of new material, Behind the Eyes, came out in 1997, and she releases Simple Things, her 17th album, this week.
Between those two albums, Grant's 16-year marriage to singer Gary Chapman ended. In 2000, she married country singer Vince Gill, and the following year the couple had a daughter, Corrina.
For a singer with a significant part of her audience in the Christian music market, a divorce can devastate a career. But other people's reactions were the least of Grant's concerns at the time.
"I was so oblivious to what other people were saying," Grant says. "I had enough on my own plate."
Grant wasn't entirely silent during that six-year period. She released a Christmas album, her third, in 2000 and a collection of favorite hymns last year.
"I thought, 'Hey, even though my life is in smithereens, everybody is still celebrating Christmas, and I do, too,'" she says. "Then, with the hymns record, we were about two-thirds of the way through Simple Things, but I still wasn't ready to have my own ideas front and center."
Grant wrote the first song intended for the album, Out in the Open, in the fall of 1999. In June 2000, she, Gill, producer Keith Thomas and several favorite co-writers traveled to Florida to work on songs for the album.
"I got pregnant on the writing trip, so that derailed us a little bit."
Simple Things finds Grant reassembling her life, piece by piece, on songs such as Innocence Lost, Looking for You and Happy. She and Gill sing on Beautiful. On the album's title track, now at No. 24 on Airplay Monitor's Adult Contemporary chart, she sings of "the true miracle of forgiving."
"It took so long to make the record that I think it uniquely captures a very interesting arc of human experience," Grant says. "Going from a place of shame to forgiveness, beyond the light at the end of the tunnel to real peace on the other side."
Though it wasn't obvious at the time, the introspective and often somber Behind the Eyes hinted at Grant's frame of mind as her first marriage fell apart.
"I was obviously in turmoil, but I was discovering it as I was writing," Grant says. "I think I was disengaging the pom-pom-waving mechanism in me and trying to lower my level of denial."
Simple Things is a more transparent album, its message basic. When Grant heads into the chorus of the album's lead track by singing "This is where love begins," she means effort, reassurance and the joy of holding hands.
"I like that, because this is really how life feels now. You wait for that big delivery, then everything about the chorus is so simple. It's like the song is the setup for these big pearls of wisdom, then you go, 'It's all the simple stuff.' "
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