Amy Grant Is Still Telling the Real Story
There’s a palpable vibe shift in the room. Sure, the CCM Magazine team might carry a little nervous energy in the days leading up to a Cover Story, but typically things speed up once the artist arrives. This time, everything slowed down. Conversations softened. People leaned in without realizing it. No one rushed. No one needed to. The focus quietly rearranged itself as Amy Grant stepped into our studio.
The most striking thing, as she sits just a few feet across from me, is how completely unassuming she is in the middle of it all. She doesn’t seem to carry the weight of someone who has spent her career shaping the sound of popular music, or someone whose songs have threaded their way through all of our lives. If anything, she seems slightly amused by the idea that any of that might be the case.
Grant is back on the PR train promoting her first new record in over a decade The Me That Remains. Before our time she had already completed a national news interview, and was preparing for a live album signing the next day. It wasn’t until mid-afternoon that our cameras started rolling.
“By the end of the day, I’m sick of talking about myself” she tells me with a laugh.
I’ve been sitting with The Me That Remains for a few weeks now, trying to understand how a record that feels this personal, this reflective, and at times this heavy, could also feel so alive. That question led me to her producer, 9x CMA Musician of the Year Award winner and longtime member of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer Band, Mac McAnally.
“Life is heavy. Life’s kind of everything all at once.”
-Amy Grant
For an album that carries so much weight, the experience of making it, at least from his perspective, couldn’t have been more different.
“She called me and said… ‘I just want to cut two songs,’” McAnally recalls. “And then the next morning she said, ‘I forgot how much fun that is… I want to do a whole project.’”
What started as a simple session to record two new songs didn’t come from some grand creative vision. In fact, it started a bit more practically than that.
“I’m from another generation, but they’re telling me I need some content,” Mac McAnally remembers her saying when she first reached out.
Amy Grant doesn’t exactly live in the world of constant posting. “I don’t think “content creation”, because I don’t have a very active social media life personally,” she says.
During this time her focus was elsewhere. “I used my creative energy in other ways… hosting events, hosting a summer camp… what can we add? Let’s add archery, let’s add tree climbing,” she says, laughing slightly at the idea that all of that counts. “All those things… they take creative space.”
What started as a checkbox to satisfy the modern demand for “new content” became a rediscovery. That ease stands in quiet contrast to the subject matter of the record itself. Because The Me That Remains isn’t light listening. It’s a record shaped by time, by recovery, by the kind of life experiences that don’t leave you unchanged.
“Life is heavy,” Grant says. “Life’s kind of everything all at once.”
Over the last several years, Grant has walked through a series of health challenges that would have sidelined most artists entirely. Open-heart surgery. A serious biking accident that led to a traumatic brain injury that left her navigating recovery in ways she hadn’t anticipated. None of it plays out as spectacle on the title track, The Me That Remains. There’s no moment where the record stops to explain itself. But it’s all there.
“By the end of the day, I’m sick of talking about myself.”
-Amy Grant
“When I first started penning that lyric, it was just a conversation with myself,” she says. “It felt like a continuing healing journey for me, specifically from a head injury that had happened two years before the writing of that, and still feeling like I was not quite all the way back. But hey, this is what you wake up with. And so wrap your arms around yourself, live your life and do the best you can.” There’s no attempt to clean that up or present a finished version of the story.
Alongside the deeply personal reflections are moments that are unmistakably, directly rooted in faith. Not coded. Not softened. Not shoehorned in to meet expectations. Just present, the same way they’ve always been in her work.
“I don’t know how to see life not through a lens of faith,” Grant says. “And so whether I’m talking specifically about the love of God or about my relationship with Jesus, it’s still what undergirds everything.” For her, it’s not calculated it’s a through-line. “You just write about life. It’s your daily experiences, what you think when you lay your head on the pillow at night, your prayers, the best jokes… it all shows up in songs.”
That perspective doesn’t feel new for Grant, it just feels clearer now. “I’ve always been curious about the real story,” she tells me. “To me, it’s kind of like the way a pendulum swings. You want people to have these moments of ‘oh, that was unbelievable,’ but the pendulum swings. And what makes something really joyful is also understanding deep sadness. You have to have both. Life has always been both.”
That philosophy also shows up in the way she talks about the people who are still showing up for her.
“Now in my 60s, I’ll be playing a theater… I’ll look around the curtain and think, man, if I were home, I’d have my PJs on,” she says, smiling. “And then I look out and I see all these people—and a lot of them have gray hair—and I’m like, oh my gosh, you’re still coming.” There’s seemingly a very small separation between her as the artist and the audience.
“I think it’s just because of all the shared history,” she continues. “A song can remind you of a time in your life and you just go, ‘oh, I don’t want to forget that part of my journey.’”
Shared history feels like the closest thing to a thesis statement you’ll get from her. But even that connection isn’t where she finds her footing. “The real validation comes when you’re by yourself,” she tells me. “It can’t come in front of an audience. That would be an empty way to live.” She doesn’t say it dramatically. If anything, it feels like the most grounded thing she’s said all day. “The real validation comes every day to go, ‘hey, I woke up.’ And whether it’s the person in the checkout line that we make eye contact or have a conversation… every one of us is vibrant.” What happens on stage, she explains, is something else entirely. “Hopefully it’s an extension of that. But it’s not the reason to be at all.”
Because for as much as Amy Grant’s career can be measured in milestones, that’s not how she talks about it. She talks about it in memories that don’t belong to her alone.“All of us affect each other. All of us… The magic of music is that suddenly somebody else will go, ‘that’s my story. I feel it too,’” she says.
And yet, whether she’s chasing it or not, the legacy is impossible to ignore. When I bring up the fact that her first appearance on the cover of CCM Magazine came in 1979, she doesn’t hesitate.
“It was newspaper print!” she says, laughing. From that first cover to now, her career has stretched across six different decades of CCM Magazine history. Entire eras have come and gone. Sounds have shifted. Platforms have changed. The way people discover music has been completely reinvented more than once.
“Most artists, if they stay at it long enough, there’s a point where you kind of circle back to the music that formed you in the first place.”
-Amy Grant
And through all of it, Amy Grant has remained present, evolving, but never disconnected from where she started.
She has been tied with the distinction of most CCM Magazine covers with Michael W. Smith—a longtime peer, a collaborator, friend and someone whose career has run parallel to hers.
With this cover, she moves ahead. At least for now.
“Sure, he’s pretty prolific,” she says with a smile. This led us into a side conversation about her friend Michael. “We’ve just been witnesses to each other’s lives through a lot of decades. I mean, we met in 1981. I was toward the end of my college years, and he was freshly in Nashville… And for him, it was all about the music… and I’m just so glad that he’s remained in my life. Sometimes we’ll go weeks and months without seeing each other. Last night I got a text from him, ‘Hey, how are you spending your time? I’m thinking about you.’ I was like, well, ‘I was working in a garden’ and he’s like, ‘Call Deb.’ His wife – and she and I went to high school together… that’s a real gift.” That history still shows up in the work on their latest collaboration on the track The Saint. This song deals directly with the balance between our Christian faith and the real-world addictions facing our families.
“This was kind of different,” she says of their recent collaboration. “Over the years, usually Michael will hand me music and go, ‘I’m kind of thinking about this for the melody… sing whatever you want.’ He’s giving me a playground to create on.” “This time I said, ‘Would you please write this music?’” When we think about her collaboration with Smith, it is easy to be transported back to the days when Contemporary Christian Music was being completely reshaped by them. When you see Grant today those original hits are still prominently placed on the setlist. They may not have been produced with lifetimes in mind and yet, here they are landing often in entirely new ways for the audience and Grant herself. “I’m grateful that my life’s work has compelled me to repeat themes,” she says. “I’ve sung ‘El Shaddai’ for 45 years. The things that come out of our mouth over and over do shape our thoughts, and our thoughts shape our actions in our lives. And because of my job, I am compelled to sing those beautiful words every day.”
Amy is here to talk about her new music, but when I asked her to pick a classic song for a bonus feature for our YouTube audience, her answer caught me off guard. She went straight to what might be the biggest crossover hit in Christian music history, “Baby, Baby.”
When I asked why, the biggest smile of the day showed up.
“That song was the flavor of the moment, the way music was back in the early ’90s,” she says. “But the fun thing about an old song that most everybody has a memory with… you can just see the time get wiped off somebody’s face. It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, we were in seventh grade. I still remember our dance moves. That’s the beauty of a song. It kind of time-stamps a year in your life and everybody else’s.”
I mentioned that The Me That Remains feels reminiscent of her earliest work and she doesn’t push back on that. “I think that’s probably true,” Amy Grant says. “Most artists, if they stay at it long enough, there’s a point where you kind of circle back to the music that formed you in the first place… That’s where it all started. And over time, that foundation is still there, whether you realize it or not.”
In that way, the record doesn’t feel like a departure at all. “What you want with a song is you want it to be believable,” she says. “When I’m creating a song or singing a song, perfection is not the most important thing. It’s believability and relatability.”
Everyone in Nashville seems to have an Amy Grant story. In the days leading up to our interview alone, they continued to emerge like Middle Tennessee tall tales. Our Director of Photography’s parents, who saw her almost daily at a local convenience store. My barber, who told me his sister was one of her closest friends and loved her because she always remembered his name. My children’s teacher, who moved to Nashville dreaming of being Amy’s backup singer and, while that didn’t happen, ended up watching her own kids perform alongside her at Christmas events year after year.
The story of Amy Grant is somehow all of ours. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s divine and you can feel it radiating out of her. Mac McAnally told me that the presence she carries doesn’t begin when she steps onto a stage or into a studio. “She is the same person every day, to everyone in the world. She’s not a made-up character… Even atheists know that she’s an angel.”
