By Andree Farias
Without any reservations, CCM Magazine once crowned Amy Grant’s Lead Me On the best album in the history of Christian music. But more than the Grammy or the acclaim it received, it marked a new era for Grant: she was no longer the girl next door, but an artist of substance, paving the way for transparency and honesty in artistic expressions of faith. Today, 20 years after the release of that seminal recording, Sparrow Records is giving the album the royal treatment it deserves, complete with a remaster, a bonus disc of live material and re-recorded favorites, and extensive liner notes. In this interview, Grant reminisces about the album—from recording and singing its songs live to recreating the magic in an upcoming commemorative tour.
CMP: Lead Me On was a pivotal album for you—a coming of age of sorts. You could say it was the album where you went from being the girl next door to being a woman coming to grips with her faith. Did it feel that way at the time for you?
Amy Grant: At that time, everything was changing. My grandmother passed away that year. I became a mother for the fist time. The recording environment was different form what I’d experienced with records before that. It felt like a natural evolution of creativity. It didn’t feel extraordinarily different. But I think at that time in my life—having had enough difficulties—I didn’t want to be the faith cheerleader anymore.
CMP: Is that why the disc was darker and more introspective than anything you’d done before?
Grant: Not intentionally. And it wasn’t that I had a crisis of faith. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe. That’s not the case at all. I had just lived enough—at that point I’d already been to marriage counseling, and I was adjusting to a child. I think I was scratching my own head, “I don’t understand a lot of things about life; I don’t understand a lot of things about relationships. I don’t understand hypocrisy in myself and other people.” So I think it was just such an honest assessment of life as I knew it.
CMP: You were pregnant during the recording process and had your baby during the recording process. Did people think you were nuts at the time for doing that?
Grant: The two weeks of recording around my son’s birth, we were actually cutting tracks, so I didn’t have to sound very good. I was big and winded, but it didn’t matter because I was just there doing the guide vocals. I was there in the studio pretty nonstop, but we actually waited a few weeks for my stitches to heal before I tried to actually sing (laughs). I had to work pretty hard to sing anyway. I noticed that it was actually tougher. I felt like my voice was a lot more inconsistent, but I think it was because of all the hormonal changes going on.