AMY GRANT

Born: Augusta, Georgia, 25 November 1960

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Heart in Motion (1991)

Hit songs since 1990: "Baby Baby," "That's What Love Is For," "Every Heartbeat"

One of the most celebrated and influential Christian music artists, Amy Grant added "pop star" to her resume in the 1990s, crossing over to mainstream radio with hits such as "Baby Baby."

Grant released her first record at the age of fifteen. Her soaring vocals and inspiring songs of faith and devotion quickly established her as a leading artist in the Christian music community. Her 1982 album Age to Age sold more than 1 million copies and earned Grant a Grammy Award for Best Female Gospel Performance.

Grant's affinity for pop sounds led to her discovery by mainstream audiences. Her 1985 album Unguarded spawned two crossover pop singles: "Find a Way" and "Wise Up." She also topped the Billboard pop charts in 1986 with "The Next Time I Fall," a duet with Peter Cetera. Sensing Grant's potential for massive mainstream appeal, A&M Records signed Grant to a major distribution deal.

In 1991 Grant released Heart in Motion, her best-selling album and her most controversial. While Heart in Motion continued Grant's foray into pop music, the album was less explicitly Christian, with fewer direct references to Scripture; conservative elements of the Christian music community criticized Grant for "selling out" her faith. The lead single "Baby Baby" was a flashpoint for the controversy. Though the lyrics were generally sweet and wholesome ("Baby, baby / I'm taken with the notion / To love you with the sweetest of devotion / Baby, baby / My tender love will flow from / The bluest sky to the deepest ocean"), the song's promotional video depicted Grant frolicking around with a male model—a visual that some of Grant's traditionalist fans refused to accept. Despite the controversy, "Baby Baby" was a major hit and exposed Grant to entirely new pop audiences.

In 1991 and 1992, Grant was omnipresent on pop radio; the follow-up singles—"Every Heartbeat," "That's What Love Is For," and "Good for Me"—were all Top 10 hits. Grant's singles all flowed from the same basic crossover strategy: light synthesizer-based pop sounds with broadly devotional lyrics that could be interpreted in a spiritual manner by many of her traditional fans while not alienating non-Christian listeners; the serene ballad "That's What Love Is For" typifies this approach, with its celebration of love, spiritual or otherwise: "Sometimes I wonder if we really feel the same / Why we can be unkind / Questioning the strongest of hearts / That's when we must start / Believing in the one thing that has gotten us this far." On the strength of such crossover hits as "That's What Love Is For," Heart in Motion spent fifty-two weeks on the Billboard album charts and sold more than 4 million records.

For the rest of the decade, Grant remained entrenched in the pop scene. House of Love, released in 1994, did not spawn any major hit singles along the lines of "Baby Baby," but it did broaden Grant's mainstream sound; the album included a duet with the country star Vince Gill and a cover of Joni Mitchell's folk-pop classic "Big Yellow Taxi." Behind the Eyes (1997) also registered with pop audiences, debuting at number eight on the Billboard album charts and selling 1 million copies; Behind the Eyes also featured the minor hit "Takes a Little Time," a track that finds Grant delving into bluesy rock.

Grant's tenuous relationship with the Christian music community was further strained in 1999, when she divorced Gary Chapman, her husband of sixteen years, and married her duet partner Gill. Musically, Grant returned to her roots with the release of Legacy . . . Hymns and Faith (2002), a collection of sacred and secular recordings; the album features Gill as an arranger and includes standards such as "My Jesus, I Love Thee."

Though it earned her the enmity of traditionalists, Grant was the first and most successful crossover act from the contemporary Christian music scene.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Amy Grant (Reunion, 1977); My Father's Eyes (Reunion, 1979); Never Alone (Reunion, 1980); Age to Age (Reunion, 1982); Straight Ahead (Reunion, 1984); Unguarded (Reunion, 1985); Lead Me On (A&M, 1988); Heart in Motion (A&M, 1991); Home for Christmas (A&M, 1992); House of Love (A&M, 1994); Behind the Eyes (A&M, 1997); A Christmas to Remember (Interscope, 1999); Legacy . . . Hymns and Faith (Universal, 2002).

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