Put Amy Grant on the concert stage and while it's true she's concerned about your soul, she's also looking out for your body. "Three years ago," she says in discussing her music and concerts, "I think we had maybe one danceable song. These days we have a lot of get-up-and-shake songs."
The change explains why Miss Grant's music has moved far beyond the traditional limits of Christian music. After eight albums on the Christian-music Word label, the 25-year-old Miss Grant recorded "Unguarded" for A&M Records last year and the result was pop acceptance of Christian music featuring electric guitars, amplifiers and a rock 'n' roll-style stage show.
Singles "Find a Way," "Wise Up" and "Everywhere I Go" made their way onto pop-radio playlists and the Billboard charts. Her "Find a Way" video has been seen on MTV, a single titled "Who to Listen to" has been used on TV's "Miami Vice" and her "Unguarded" album is No. 162 on Billboard's Top Pop chart. The album also earned her a Grammy for best gospel female soloist Tuesday night. She's performed live for more than half a million people in the last six months with 25,000 hearing a show in Dallas, Texas.
"I never saw it coming," she says, perhaps too modestly. "I don't think I looked that far down the road. Just showing up and singing was all I thought about." She calls large crowds "shockers," saying, "I played some show last summer where we had 20,000 or 21,000 people and I remember thinking, `Come on, you're kidding. Don't you guys have anything else to do?' "
She doesn't. Miss Grant does have a husband, Gary Chapman, who's the guitarist in her 10-person group, but her life - for now, at least -consists of little more than touring and recording. "I would like to have a family," she says during a telephone interview from her hometown of Nashville, Tenn. "But I think Gary and I are suspended between the excitement of a family and how that would change what we're doing. Plus, there's the fact we're still kind of young. We're just gliding."
A native of Augusta, Ga., whose radiologist father moved his family to Nashville when she was an infant, Miss Grant has been recording since she was 15, but she didn't really think her future included being a high-profile performer until she met her husband.
"In the spring of '82," she says, "my friends were graduating from college and I was dropping out. I just thought that I'd been doing this for five years and this is what I'm going to do. I didn't know who I was going to marry, though, or if they'd embrace my life's choice. "Then I married Gary and we shared the same dream, and that's when we dug in. That's when we launched full-scale tours and it was the first time since I'd been singing that I hadn't been in school."
She dropped out of Vanderbilt, where she was majoring in English literature because of a "romantic" notion that art should be pursued for its intrinsic values. "I thought I wanted to have an enriched mind and when I graduated from college I'd enroll in a typing class," she says. "My big battle cry in college was, `You guys ought to be reading.' People get lost, I thought, and you just get a mindless group of people and all they do is punch a time clock."
Her parents weren't overly concerned. After all, they'd given her and her three sisters what Miss Grant calls "a real strong sense of right and wrong" and she identified with their lives. "My parents are Christians," she says. "They are warm and tender people and they seemed pretty excited about it religion. In my early days of high school, I decided to sit down and plow through the Bible and see what I thought of it. It came to life for me and I understood why my parents feel the way they do."
Given that background and a literally life-long appreciation of pop music - she had wrangled a gofer job in a Nashville recording studio that led to her "discovery" when she was 14 - it was only natural for Miss Grant's early music to be totally non-secular. "It wasn't a stand," she says. "It's just what I was writing at the time. It the rock edgemay have always been there, but my music didn't always give people a chance to cut loose."
It started to do so, she says, because she realized there are more ways than one to make a joyful noise. "I think that a certain percentage of my music is always going to be inextricably tied to the scriptures and specific Bible teachings and lyrics specifically about Jesus," she says. "But you know that I've experienced a wonderful freedom this last year to know that as a creative person it's just as worshipful for me to write a song about my love for my husband or the way it makes me feel to drive down Highway 100 on a sunny day with the wind in my hair.
"What I've realized is that the creative process - just being willing to create and to accept that gift as a gift from God - has a lot of value in it no matter what the song does." That doesn't mean she is going to give literal meaning to media descriptions calling her "the Madonna of contemporary gospel" or "the Michael Jackson of Christian music." They, too, deal in her specialty -communication - but she wants to be a "top pop singer with a wholesome image" who gives her audiences more than a good time or cheap thrills.
She's not certain her Christian message always gets across. "I was in Augusta last October and I wanted to say one thing and I couldn't get the kids to be quiet. I wanted to say something about the song, but finally just gave up and turned to the drummer and said to go into it . . . kids and the power of enthusiasm. "I don't know if the gospel according to Grant always gets across. Maybe not. But you know I feel in those circumstances that the camaraderie is very important. If they don't hear what I'm saying it's not necessarily a loss. Just being there for each other is a big part of it."
So it is that she unabashedly rocks out. Her show involves "quite a bit" of production with a specially built stage, "about 500 lights" and a tour endorsement by Yamaha that means "we're playing anything and everything that Yamaha puts out" in the way of musical equipment. That, she notes, markedly differentiates her concerts from those given by Sandi Patti, but she understands what's going on. "I think her audience is older than mine," Miss Grant says. "I went to her show and there were lots of people there in suits and ties."
And that, of course, brings up a major difference between the two singers and their fans. "Her whole stage demeanor is very different from mine," says Miss Grant, who believes that people who are moved ought to be moving. "I think the audience spontaneously stood up one time - I mean during a song, because she gets standing ovations. But as far as getting up, there was just a handful of us who got up. Me, I can't sit still."
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