Past Internet Articles About Amy Grant

When most musicians say they like to make their shows as intimate as a living room, it's really just a figure of speech.

Amy Grant means it.

"We're taking my living room furniture there," Grant says of her shows this week in Fort Worth, Texas. "I told everybody I wanted these shows to feel like my living room, so a friend of mine said, 'Well, why don't you take the furniture?' So we're bringing my couch, a chair and I'm having a print made up of a painting we bought by Robert Harper. This picture that I see every day in my home will be the backdrop for the show."

In a way, Grant wanting to paint a picture of her home life, and feel like she's at home, makes perfect sense. After years of recording and touring, with and without her country-music icon of a husband, Vince Gill, Grant says it's time for a nice, long breather. She doesn't have any plans to make a new record anytime soon, and she's playing only a handful of shows this year.

Grant, 45, has seen her career come full circle. In the '80s, the Georgia-born singer established herself as one of the leading lights, commercially and artistically, in contemporary Christian music, becoming one of the genre's first superstars. That laid the groundwork for her crossover into pop music in the late '80s/early '90s via hits such as "Baby Baby" and "That's What Love Is For." After her mainstream popularity began to wane a bit, she went back to inspirational music, releasing CDs of spiritual hymns.

Now, she says, she's pouring her energy into her family. She has four children--three from her previous marriage to Texas-born songwriter Gary Chapman, one with Gill--and the last thing she wants to do is raise them on the road.

"We've done that before--taken the kids on the road," says Grant, who has lived in Nashville most of her life (aside from a short stint in Houston). "We hired tutors to go on the road with us, and it was fine. I love touring and performing, and it's a great catalyst for releasing what you think and how you feel, but I have three teens and a 5-year-old, and these are the most important times in their lives. It would be fine with them if I checked out and went on tour, but it's not fine with me. This is a time in my life when I want to be with them in a way that I haven't been able to be with them before."

As the clock ticks and musical trends wash away what was once popular, Grant says she realizes she probably won't again reach the commercial peak she ascended to at the height of her career. Although other artists may be in denial, refusing to believe they won't sell millions of records again, Grant embraces her cooled career.

"I think that there are great examples of women who have had lifelong pop careers--Cher, Tina Turner--people whose music is timeless and who don't do the same thing and who always reinvent themselves. That's not me," she says. "Honestly, it's a relief to me to not look at the Hot 100 all the time and worry about jumping in there and trying to play that game. That part of music doesn't matter to me anymore. What still matters to me is a great song that can turn your mood on a dime."

She has a few of those songs floating around in her head, she says. Getting them down on paper is the tough part.

"As you can imagine, it's hard for me to find time to work on music," she says. "Writing, for me at least, requires solitude, and I don't know how to get it. I love being around the kids, but my 5-year-old is so demanding, there's hardly any time to have a thought. But I'm always scribbling down a lyric or poem, and I have to tell you, I think the best stuff is yet to come."