To Be Together: Amy Grant Talks Emotional Family Memories, New Christmas Album
Additional reporting by Monica Molinaro
The holidays are supposed to be a time of joy, but Amy Grant’s Tennessee Christmas, her first collection of new Christmas songs in more than a decade, came about because of a scary family experience that saw her daughter in what Grant describes as “horrendous wreck.”
A week after writing the song “To Be Together” with her longtime friend and collaborator Chris Eaton, Grant’s daughter was in an accident. “Right before spring break, she and her boyfriend were headed home on St. Patrick’s Day from plans for the evening, when a car lost control on the other side of the interstate, jumped the median, and hit them head-on,” Grant tells Yahoo Music. “Chris and I had just finished that song, and it was in my head in the emergency room, just that phrase, ‘Knowing this is all that really matters, to be together.’ I felt so much comfort in that, even though we were just scared to death. It was that experience with that song helping me in an unexpected time of trauma. It made me want to do this record to provide comfort, companionship, but especially if life was unsettling, especially if someone felt lonely.”
For Grant, she needed to know new Christmas music would matter to her and to her audience. “I guess those days at Vanderbilt Hospital to me were more of a litmus test for the ability of the song to bring comfort,” she says. “Because quite frankly, I was laughing with my daughter who’s home from New York for a couple weeks, going, ‘Am I becoming a caricature of myself? ‘Cause this is the fourth decade in a row that I have put out new Christmas music.’ And so you go, ‘Really? C’mon.’”
For Grant and her husband of 16 years, country star Vince Gill, Christmas holds a lot of significance. It was the time of year they first met.
“Yes, back in December of ’93, the National Symphony asked me if I would do a fundraiser for them, a benefit. It got to be November, and I thought it will have to be a Christmas show. And so, right about that time, Vince’s manager called my manager and said, ‘Hey, Vince is recording a Christmas special with Michael McDonald and Chet Atkins, would Amy be a guest?’ And I said, ‘Hey, I’ll do your TV show if you’ll be a guest of mine on this fundraiser,’” she recalls. “So we actually worked together — I flew to Tulsa and worked with him, and then just a few days later we came back and did this Christmas show together in Nashville.”
As she recalls, the connection was instantaneous. “Working together like that, first off, he’s so freakishly gifted. I’ve never heard a more effortless singer, ever. And looking back on it, I think I just fell in love with him instantly. And not because of his voice, but because of his kindness,” she says. “Our connection was that, and it was so weird because he felt the same way, and it went unspoken for a long time. And this is the craziest thing is when I was leaving to go to Tulsa, the man I was married to said, ‘Don’t fall in love with him. I’ve met him, and I’ve spent some time with him, and you guys are cut from the same cloth.’ That’s how it happened. Clearly that really made me look forward to Christmas, because I knew I would get to see him. Because it was years before we got married, and both living very public lives, and trying to carry on with integrity. But eventually I had to get off the road I was on and get on the road he was on.”
As Grant, an expert on seasonal releases, points out, holiday albums are always a time of reflection. “End of the calendar year too, so you sort of look back and go, ‘Well, there went 2016.’ It’s a taking-stock kind of thing too,” she says.
With 2016 seeing so much loss and suffering, this holiday season is one for much reflection and will be emotional for many. Grant empathizes as she says, “You can’t fake being moved. I guess, to me, that’s the whole goal of a song, to articulate something real and honest enough that somebody goes, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s exactly how I feel,’ or ‘That’s how I wanna feel.’ Creativity and a lump in the throat, those things go hand in hand.”
For Grant personally, there is a song on Tennessee Christmas that especially gets to her. “The song on this record that just wiped me out was ‘Joy t o the World,’” she says. “And here’s the crazy thing, Ed Cash, who was the producer on that song, he says, ‘I have an idea that I want this song to be sung very slowly.’ So we played it down the first time; it was so slow I couldn’t even figure out how to sing it. I was just doing scratch vocals and I was scared to death. And all the musicians went, ‘Oh my gosh, I couldn’t stop listening.’ I think that song is always done quickly, kind of arousing something, and it’s one of my dad’s favorite songs, so I wanted to do it for him. My dad has crazy dementia — he hasn’t said my name in years — but hearing that song in a different speed context, a different tempo, really undid me. I felt like I never heard it before.”
