To call our second group final long-awaited hardly does it justice.
I can’t count the number of people – for all kinds of reasons – who are leaving this tournament intrigued by Lauren Daigle, myself included. I knew she existed. I knew she was getting paid attention to. I had no idea how big she was when I started. I heard “You Say” mentioned in casual conversation in church on Sunday. There are high schoolers following this enterprise who are only here for Lauren Daigle.
She got less attention in the upset-minded women post on Day #9 than Jaci Velasquez did because, frankly, I had very little to say that wouldn’t make me sound like a stupid old. Her relevance is something we don’t understand nearly enough yet, but I’m pretty sure, if we do another thing like this in five years or so, she won’t be sitting on the #10 line and “upsetting” the entire field like so many mid-majors who want to prove exactly how wrong you were in seeding them.
But this tournament was only ever going to have one #1 seed. Not this group. This tournament. She’s not the most important woman in this field, she’s the most important artist. And maybe not just in Christian music – in 20th century popular music, period.
It’s time to talk about Amy.
I might have a little bit to say here.
When the South Georgia Conference’s youth ministry group came through Folkston United Methodist Church and I got to sit in with the youth for the first time, I heard Amy Grant for the first time. I think I was 11. I think it was the summer of 1983.
I had other recordings of Christian music. I had heard the Jesus stuff and I was unimpressed. Of course, part of this was because I was Florida-Georgia Line (not the band, never the band; the place) and I listened to WQIK all the time and “Pancho and Lefty” was my favorite song and I was becoming a serious Alabama and Ricky Skaggs and John Anderson burnout. Christian music, to me, was the Oak Ridge Boys asking “Would They Love Him Down In Shreveport”.
These youth counselors (many of whom I would get to know later camping at Epworth-By-The-Sea and who fed into me in ways I never would understand until much later in life) brought praise songs for us to sing. Their presentations of the lyrics were slide shows, which seemed to us swamp kids like the highest in high tech. And their sound system was legit, like nothing I’d ever seen in my quiet little Methodist church.
They were subversive, too. I thought it was kind of cool that they counted Kenny Loggins as “praise music.” I’ve always had a soft spot for “Heart To Heart” because of that.
It was when this hit the speakers, though, that my world got rocked.
If you really want to appreciate how I first heard that: don’t listen to it through your iPhone speaker. Get some earbuds in, or get some good speakers hooked up.
And then crank it.
I don’t know what it looks like for an 11-year-old to be blown out of the room, but I was that, and I knew that something had happened that I needed to know more about.
The exact opposite of teenaged rebellion, of course, is telling your parents that the album you absolutely, positively must have is Amy Grant’s Age to Age. Sure, there are probably those who objected to the warm guitars that jumped into the mix before Amy started singing. But nobody – nobody – could have a problem with that classical piano, which was so masterfully executed. And Amy Grant’s voice was perfection. There’s no voice like it in music, sacred or otherwise – pure and clear, and so earnest. You believe what she sings, the moment she sings it.
Now, the albums before and after weren’t my cup of tea – they weren’t as big or as bold. And not all the songs I found registered with me – I’ve never really warmed up to “I Have Decided”, the album’s answer to Petra, and “Fat Baby” is a meandering novelty number, and it took me years before I understood what a triumph “Arms of Love” was. But the album hit far more than it missed.
And it was a sampler pack for artists I’d come to understand the importance of later. “Sing Your Praise To The Lord”, I’d find, was the work of Rich Mullins. “El Shaddai” introduced me to work of Michael Card. “Raining On The Inside” was a collaboration between Grant and the underrated Kathy Troccoli. And all over the place were the fingerprints of Michael W. Smith, for so long Grant’s running mate at the top of CCM, and Gary Chapman, the man who became Grant’s husband and most consistent collaborator.
But in all of this, I had one album, and I never really seriously considered CCM outside that one album; other stuff might have interested me, but Age to Age was what I kept coming back to.
Until Unguarded.
Oh yes, the vaunted CCM Keyboard is splashed all over the record, in its most widely-heard form. It’s a pop record. It’s unapologetically a pop record.
But listen close.
You tell me your friends are distant
You tell me your man’s untrue
You tell me that you’ve been walked on
And how you feel abused…
I know this life is a strange thing
I can’t answer all the why’s
Tragedy always finds me
Taken again by surprise
I could stand here an angry young woman
Taking all of the pain to heart
But I know that love can bring changes
And so we’ve got to move on
Amy Grant had a reputation (at least among the philistines among us) for being something of a sainted princess of Christian music. But even on the album that belongs the most to its 80’s era (that coat!), there is an edge to the words. There is an understanding of the darkness that many live in.
The words may have been an afterthought in the mid-80’s. Over thirty years later, in the era of #MeToo, we wonder if Amy was understanding something far deeper than we knew.
And Amy was only getting serious about artistic exploration. Understand this: Amy Grant got a song about slavery and the Holocaust on the radio.
Did it sell like “Find A Way?” Of course not! Did the album resonate like Unguarded? Of course not! The title track was about slavery and the Holocaust!
And not only that – none of the tracks of the album were simple, easy listening. Even the love song at the end, “Say Once More”, has a desperation that is unbecoming of the Sainted Amy’s reputation – “tell me that time won’t erase the way that my heart sees your face”. The most radio-ready songs on the album were “Sure Enough”, which is assertive and forceful in ways women in evangelicalism were not expected to be, and Jimmy Webb’s “If These Walls Could Speak”, which is just painfully sad. “Faithless Heart” seemed to indicate that Grant knew exactly what was coming in her marriage, and feared it.
But that album did sell. It did resonate. And that album isn’t still considered the best album in the history of Christian music without reason. Even if pop music isn’t your cup of tea – even if Christian music is something you wouldn’t be caught dead listening to – Lead Me On is the one album in the genre you must own. No album in the genre has its accessibility while exploring its depths.
(If you had the album on tape or vinyl, and you knew someone who had the album on CD, you also realized that you were missing out on the best track on the “record” and two of the best four or five. “If You Have To Go Away” was merely a brilliant pop gem about missing the partner on the road that never gets old. But if you never have heard “Wait For The Healing“, and you want to get your preconceived notions of Amy Grant shattered, that’s another one to put in your ears and turn up good and loud.)
Unguarded and Lead Me On, these two triumphs, two albums that I will insist fit alongside the very best output of any artist in this field, are enough for me. I’m perfectly content putting Amy Grant atop this whole field on the basis of those two albums alone.
Of course, it wasn’t just those two albums. It was all the success in the midst, and all the success that followed. Unguarded and Lead Me On bookended a smash #1 duet with Peter Cetera…
…and led into Heart In Motion, the long-awaited Amy Grant Pop Breakthrough that made me cheer no matter how cheesy “Baby Baby” was.
Obviously, if you know the down-side of the VH1 Behind The Music patented story, you know that it did not make everyone cheer. The backlash against Heart In Motion (and the video frolicking and the ambiguity in the singles) was swift in CCM, and it was severe, and so little was ever the same again. Long before Chris Crocker pleaded with the world to “leave Britney alone”, a punk band called Lust Control went as close to viral as you could get in my tiny little alternative-Christian world in the early 90’s saying “leave Amy alone“. It was a scream into the void.
In the midst, a marriage ended and a whole lot of innocence was lost, both for the artist and for a whole lot of us who appreciated the art.
Y’know, Amy Grant did a really funny thing, though.
She kept recording songs.
A new Amy Grant song is a visit from an old friend. Amy was with me through my junior high and high school years, through my own doubt and rejection of the faith I was raised in and into my full embrace of the faith. More than anyone else who made music, she made it plain that nothing about the path was easy, and it was still full of reason to hope.
Hearing her remind me to hope again is always something that’s welcome. But it’s beyond that. It will always be beyond that.
Sister, Mother
(1) Amy Grant vs. (10) Lauren Daigle
The Newest CCM Bracket Ever 