A Collection of Memories
By John W. Styll

Myrrh Records recently released Amy Grant: The Collection. Although, it contains two newly recorded songs, it is essentially a "best of" album. (Considering the number of hits that have come from her seven studio albums and two live albums, it could have been a two or three record set!) While everyone has their favorites, different songs mean various things to various people. The fact is that a lot of history is wrapped up in the songs on this album, and we were interested in what these particular songs mean to the one who sang them. We asked Amy to reminisce with is about her studio albums, the songs from them which appear on The Collection, and the things that were happening in her life at the time.

The First Album (1978)

I was so self-conscious at the time that I kept all the lights off in the studio when I recorded. In fact, Brown was the only one who was ever in there when I was doing vocals. I remember one time when I had all the lights out. Brown was in the studio and Chris Christian walked in. As soon as I saw Chris, I stopped singing. Brown just faked like he was doing something. Just working on some stuff. I don’t know if he even told Chris I was there because then Chris would have stayed and we couldn’t have kept working. I was very self-conscious.

Brown wrote "Mountain Top" on a little mound of grass behind a McDonald’s somewhere between Abilene and Nashville. He wrote "Old Man’s Rubble" at Goldmine Studio. I was there but I didn’t really have much part in it. Both of those songs have real specific memories for me. They are a wash of memory over my sophomore year youth group time in church. Brown taught me how to play "Mountain Top" on the guitar, so I sang it every time we had a retreat. And "Old Man’s Rubble" was basically the summation of an entire year’s worth of teaching that Brown finally sat down and put to song.

My Father’s Eyes (1979)

Gary wrote "Father’s Eyes," and Brown and I wrote "Faith Walkin’ People." The hardest thing about doing that record is that I was going to school in South Carolina. I would go to classes Monday through Friday, get on a plane Friday afternoon, fly through Atlanta to Nashville, work the whole weekend, and then fly back to Greenville and get there about 11:00 Sunday night. That went on every weekend for about two-and-a-half months.

I think what I liked the most was the face that I was madly in love with Brown and my parents trusted us to the end of the earth. We were doing what we loved the most – being in the studio and writing songs. Sometimes I’d take a girlfriend to the studio with me and we would work for 36 hours or more collapsing to sleep on the floor if we got exhausted. Then we would wake up and keep writing songs. It was just wonderful. It was wintertime and it was snowing. We would build fires out there and work. It was just loads of fun.

Never Alone (1980)

The Never Alone album is special because it came about a really gross time in my life. It was my sophomore year in college. All of a sudden I started feeling the pressure that I had to be somebody. I was having a lot of doubts and my life was very undisciplined. I really felt gross about myself. I was sowing wild oats and still having to get up on stage many weekends to sing. I don’t think I was hypocritical because I don’t think having a heart after God means being perfect, but I didn’t understand that then. Actually, I don’t know what all I was thinking except that I was just so undisciplined. I was failing classes at school and staying up all night away from my dorm, and my mother was calling and talking to me about reputation.

Finally at Thanksgiving time I called home and said, "I cannot stay. I’m losing a grip." I had heard that a couple of girls I had grown up with were going to go stay with a missionary family in Switzerland for the month of January. And I thought "This is it" and asked my mom and dad if I could go.

It wasn’t exactly a vacation. I mean, there wasn’t a huge bear rug in front of some fireplace in the house, but it was a lovely place to be. We did go skiing three times, but we had to drive a long way to get there. We had cooking classes, heavy Bible study, worship time, one-on-one counseling. So, I was there for a month thinking I was going to come back really happy, and it only got worse. I got low and starting reading my Bible even though I had no energy for God. I felt like I didn’t have any nerves. I just felt wooden. And while I was in Switzerland, I wrote a song called "If I Have to Die."

When I came home from Switzerland, it started getting better. I don’t know exactly what started to happen. Right after I got back, I heard the song "All I Ever Have to Be" – which Gary wrote – and I cried. I cried every time we did a take in the studio. We recorded that song in February the night before I flew out for the Grammys my first time. I cried the whole night. I really think that song was a turning point for me – but not immediately. I was still pretty depressed, but slowly it started to sink in. By the time I went back to school in March, it was okay. I’m a big believer in time. I think God uses time to heal.

You know, something else about my sophomore year. I think that even in times when you are very sad, there are still some real fond memories because when you do feel happy, it’s just so incredibly wonderful.

Age to Age (1982)

When we started Age to Age, we hadn’t been in the studio for two years because of the live albums. So we had been saving that creative energy since Never Alone, and when we went back in to start Age to Age , a lot of things happened.

One, Brown and I had a new relationship, and that was honestly the best thing that could have ever happened to us creatively. When he got married, suddenly we had the freedom to be friends and not have to worry about anything else. Also, we decided to go to a place called Caribou Ranch to record. And my whole family went and all the families of the people who played on the record. And a week before we left for Caribou, Gary asked me to marry him, so he went up there too.

Something else that happened was that I decided to sing after I finished school. We recorded that album from September until January or February of my senior year in college, and I really didn’t know singing was going to be my profession until then. It was just king of something I had done, but during my senior year everybody was interviewing for jobs and going to the career planning and placement center. And I just made a decision that fall that I was going to sing. I think before that it just seemed like another course at school or something. I had been serious about it before then, but I hadn’t thought of it as my life’s work.

My most vivid memory from the period when we recorded Age to Age is when I first heard "El Shaddai," which was written by Michael Card and John Thompson. I guess Mike Blanton got a tape of it in the mail right before he came out, and he was the last one to arrive in Colorado. It was Sunday night and we were going to start recording on Monday morning. All the musicians – everybody was up there. We were just going over a few last minute songs and Mike said, "Hey, I’ve got this song. It was a reject from somebody else and they sent it to us."

We were in the studio and he put in on the cassette machine. I just kind of halfway listened because I could tell it was a little too much to listen to at that moment, but we all flipped for it. I didn’t really let myself listen because it was so heavy.

Since Gary and I were not married, I was sharing a cabin with my sister Carol. When we woke up the next morning, we built a fire. Carol and I were sitting on a little loveseat sofa in out Lanz flannel nightgowns, and I said, "I’ve got to play this song for you. I couldn’t really bring myself to listen to it last night." We were sitting with our knees up in out chests and our nightgowns hooked over our feet and we put that tape on. When we finally turned to each other after the song was over, we were both weeping. I thought, "Wow!" Nothing had come along that hit me like that in a long time. That was most visual memory of that song – hearing it with Carol all snuggled up in our nightgowns and just losing it.

A Christmas Album (1983)

I’m very nostalgic and I love my family and my great grandmother was really special to me, so "Heirlooms" is one of my favorite songs. It was from a song that Brown and Bob Farrell write, but it was about communion. I always liked it but I didn’t think it really went anywhere, so we kept a little piece of the chorus and then I went back in and re-wrote the melody and the words. But it happened in kind of an unusual way.

When we’re cutting a track, I usually get in a vocal booth and sing so that nobody will play anything right over the place I’m going to sing, but it’s just scratch vocal. But "Heirlooms" did not have any words. I had a pencil and paper because a lot of times I will write songs while we’re in the studio. It took us four passes to do that song. (That’s not very much but it’s a pretty simple song.) Every time we went through a pass, I sang a little bit more of the song. And finally on the last pass, I sang the whole song! I didn’t have one word written going into that thing – and I sang the whole song! I was scribbling as fast as I could sing and when they finally shut the tape down, Brown and Smitty and I were all crying and some of the other guys were misty-eyed because they knew there were no lyrics. It was really a strange and wonderful experience.

Straight Ahead (1984)

I like the music of "Where Do You Hide Your Heart?" For me, that was a new era of writing. I don’t know how, but I think I crossed a bridge musically. It’s quite unexplainable. Also, that song is just so simple. I get a lot of strength when I sing it to myself.

I think with Straight Ahead I started to realize that my strength in songwriting was simplicity. Maybe to somebody else that would be self-evident, but I think that with Straight Ahead and the Christmas album I really started thinking of myself as a songwriter and that "simple" was kind of my forte.

"Angels" came about in two parts. Brown, Smitty, Gary and I wrote the chorus in a church sanctuary in Colorado. After we got the track recorded, Gary and I stayed home one Sunday morning instead of going to church and wrote the verses—which we basically just took straight out of the Bible.

"Thy Word" is really very simple, too. We were at Caribou in the middle of April and there was about three-and-a-half feet of snow on the ground. I got lost trying to find my cabin one night because I’m night blind. It was snowing and my cabin was the farthest up the hill. When I finally got the to cabin, Brown called and said, "We really need these lyrics before tomorrow morning so we can cut the song." I stayed up until about three in the morning. Somehow, the experience I just had walking up to the cabin and getting a little scared gave me the visual inspiration to sit down and write the song.

Unguarded (1985)

I cried the first time I heard "Find A Way" on the radio. It was 6:00 in the morning. I was in bed in Denver, Colorado where I was on a promotional tour. I think Nashville was the first town that put it in regular rotation, and when Gary called me it was 7:00 a.m. in Nashville and he said, "Hey, kid! Listen!" I had just woken up and I stuck the phone up to my ear and he stuck the phone up to the radio. Right then about four tears squirted out. Hearing "Find A Way" on the radio was a big thrill. It was something we’d all been working toward for so long.

The first time I actually heard it on the radio was on a station which was one of the biggest top 40 stations in Oklahoma. I walked in to push my record and they said, "Just go in the studio and the dj will put in on." So I went in and he talked to me for just a few seconds and said, "You’re coming into town in a couple of months?" "Yes, I am." "Here is a new song by a girl named Amy Grant called ‘Find A Way.’" And he put it on. It was playing all over the whole station. It was a sunny day. I busted out of the studio door and ran out the front door of the whole building. It was just a big empty parking lot in the middle of Oklahoma, and I was laughing and jumping in a circle. I couldn’t even hear the song. I was just screaming.

That was probably one of my neatest memories from this year. The funny thing about that little incident is nobody even cared. The things that are so important to you – they don’t even stop the clock for anybody else. But it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t.
 

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