Amy Grant reflects on her new album, resisting labels and writing dark songs

LOS ANGELES (AP) — In the nearly 50 years she’s been working as a musician, Amy Grant has repeatedly resisted the labels others have sought to put on her. It’s difficult to overstate the influence the crossover Christian-pop artist had on culture — evangelical and otherwise — in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Throughout the Grammy winner’s career and personal life, many Christians have embraced and then rejected her at various points — be it her divorce, her move into secular music or her more recent decision to host her niece’s same-sex wedding.

Her new album, “The Me That Remains,” out Friday, was in part a way of processing a serious bicycle accident in 2022, which resulted in a traumatic brain injury, and the long recovery that followed.

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Associated Press, Grant, 65, reflected on how the accident changed her, her willingness to go dark in her music and why she keeps turning back to her faith. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: Talk about your journey with this album.

GRANT: Two summers ago, I just started writing. It felt so good to write. I used to write as really a therapy process, and I had kind of lost touch with that a little bit, just because I was in other kinds of therapy — like physical recovery. And it was just magical reengaging in my creative self. I was far enough along in my physical healing journey that it was just like, “Oh my gosh, it’s all lining back up.”

I think that the entrance into my creative self to go, “You’re not who you used to be, but you are somebody” — everybody is — and that was the first lyric. I don’t know. It was just like, “Oh God, that felt good.” And then one song led to the next.

AP: Are you fully healed from the accident or are there still some challenges?

GRANT: I mean, there are things that are different. I have a niece that said, “God, I think I like you better now.”

AP: How old is she?

GRANT: She’s in her 40s. (Laughs) I’ve known her since birth. But yeah. My processing is different. And there are areas where I have to be patient with myself, but I feel like I’m in great physical health. Just in the last year my balance is so much better. I got back on a bicycle in a very safe environment two weeks ago and it was very emotional for me. Everybody is in recovery of some kind.

AP: You’ve never been afraid to go dark with your lyrics. Talk about that.

GRANT: To me, the superpower of music is that it connects you, first and foremost, to yourself, and then to others, to God. Why pretend?

I go dark sometimes. But I think everybody does. I’m so, so glad for the world of creativity and how I first put my toe in it because that honesty in songwriting has been a constant invitation every day to show up as who I am. God, that’s what you want for everybody. I don’t want somebody’s exterior, like their presentation, to be 180 degrees from what’s in here.

AP: In one song on the album — “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm)” — you sing, “I hear the words John Lennon said / Asking me to imagine.” Can you talk about that song and your message with it?

GRANT: There are a few songs on the record that I didn’t write but I love that song and I’ve known the songwriter for a long time. Her name’s Sandy Lawrence. She worked on that song for 15 years. But it wasn’t until after the Jan. 6 experience at the U.S. Capitol that turned the creative juices for her and she was able to point that song in that direction. But all along it was about unrest.

AP: How do you feel about the current state of the world?

GRANT: There’s a lot going on, which, by the way, as a global community, there’s always a lot going on. There have always been pockets of people that were experiencing man’s inhumanity to man that is unspeakable. That’s always happening. And so I try every day to remind myself of the amazing power that every one of us has to affect the world by the daily choices we make. And however a people group is being treated, that treatment can be different through you. It can be different through me.

You have to take a lot of deep breaths. And sometimes just sit in the unrest and know that the pendulum swings back and forth, and sometimes at the cost of a lot of life. In the middle of awfulness, there’s always something good happening.

AP: People throughout your career have wanted to call you a Christian artist, but you seem to have long resisted it.

GRANT: I’ve always been compelled by curiosity and I think sometimes a potential listener can lose interest because of how something is pegged. Sometimes the way I’m introduced, I’m on the side of the stage waiting to go out and just the verbiage, I’d go, “Whew, I wouldn’t stay for that show.” Nothing about that interested me. Curiosity is such a great thing. Curiosity makes us lean in.

Everybody’s faith journey is unique. I am staking everything on the fact that it’s God who finds us. And I trust that. And I think how we let that exhibit in our lives might make somebody else curious to lean in. As a person of deep faith, I have stood outside under stormy skies, under a full moon at different times in my life and said, “Am I just talking to the ceiling? Are you really there?” And I don’t know, I come away and go, “I don’t know where else to turn.” But that’s my journey.

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.