Interview With Amy Grant

MJ: Amy Grant, thank you for joining us today. What brings you to Southern California today?

AG: I'm in the middle of a 46- city tour, and we started in Northern California and we are just working our way south.
Juggling

MJ: What's a typical tour schedule like for you?
Grant: I play four or five nights a week, and I think this tour is unique because my opening act is my husband, and so it's not your typical travelling-with-the-band experience. We've got his band and my band, and then we have three children. So we experience a lot of sleep deprivation, and we have riding toys backstage.
MJ: And you have help with the kids, obviously.
Grant: Oh, yes.
MJ: Can you take us back to the beginnings of your career in music, how you got started, how all this happened?
Grant: I was one of those kids that would listen to a 45 until my sisters were screaming at me to turn my stereo off, and hours would go by and we'd just get lost in whatever world some new record that had found its way into my life created.
When I was fifteen, I got a job at a recording studio, and I vacuumed the floors and took out the trash. About the same time I was writing songs and I didn't think my own voice was good enough to record, and I really had hoped of being an engineer. But during that time I made a tape for my mom and dad of the songs I had written, and without my knowing it some friends of mind took that tape and played it for a recording company. It was a little more folk sounding than what I do now.
MJ: So your first record was when you were seventeen?
Grant: I recorded it when I was sixteen and it came out as I turned 17.
MJ: How have things changed since then?
Grant: Well, the first six records I made I was always juggling. You know, I was juggling high school and work and then four years of college and recording, and now, well, I guess nothing has changed. I 'm still juggling. I'm juggling my family. It feels very natural now.

Playing to Nobody
MJ: But you played to audiences a bit smaller that this here tonight?
Grant: Back then? Oh, my goodness, I played to nobody back then. I remember coming to Southern California and having an album release party, and they sent out like 1,500 engraved invitations, and it was kind of in a book and music store. I must have been 17 or 18, and my mom was traveling with me.
Anyway, nobody showed up, but I had to sing for an hour and a half to nobody, and finally my mother, you know, I keep sort of making eye contact with the store manager. My mom got so embarrassed she left, so it's a pleasure to be here at the pond tonight with a full house.
MJ: Big change.
Grant: Yeah, but you know what? It will circle back around because that's the way life goes. You have to enjoy what you do because you enjoy it.
MJ: So when you're older you'll go back to one person coming?
Grant: I think I would just quit.

Multi-Generational Crowd
MJ: What do you like best about what you do - the recording, the touring, the writing? What's the best part?
Grant: All of it. Just being involved with making music is unbelievable. I could do without the publicity side. I never really cared about being famous, and still I feel like privacy is a wonderful thing. But, you know, getting the show up and to sing songs for people and watch them sing all the lyrics and you can just see them reminiscing, it's in their eyes: Oh, that reminds me of that beach trip, that I reminds me of my junior year college. I love having a job that allows other people to do that.
MJ: What kind of letters do you get from people who have been affected by your music, and what do they say?
Grant: Well, I get all kinds. The kids that started listening to me when they were teenagers, well, I was a teenager, too, and I'm 34 now, so a lot of them are grown and have families of their own, and so it gets to be kind of a multi-generational crowd, which is interesting, and they say things like, oh, I don't know.
Well, I got a note that was left for me on stage today and there was a boy that came down front last night. He had an extreme case of cerebral palsy and his mother was carrying him, and he must have been like 16 years old. I mean it took all she could do. She's like, throwing one leg forward and throwing the other leg forward just to hoist his weight down there. She held him for almost a whole song, and I just sang the whole song to him. His mom handed me a note and I had it on the stage today, which basically just said: "You know, you've been a friend to me when nobody else has." That kind of stuff is pretty special. It's just part of life.

Tennessee a Healthy Foundation
MJ: I know you live in Nashville, but you spend a lot of time in California. What does California mean to you?
Grant: Well, it's sunny. You know, you can't help but be in a good mood from a weather standpoint. I love California. It certainly does not feel like home to me. I mean I live in Tennessee, and life is different there. The pace is slower, people don't worry as much about how they look, which suits me just find. You know, I always show up in California and look at my suitcase and go: "You are a disaster!"
I don't know, I enjoy big movie theaters here that they don't really have where I live, and this seems kind of like the whole town seems like a movie set to me. I enjoy visiting.
MJ: So, it's sort of not real.
Grant: Bigger than life. You know, I grew up in an environment where you just don't really presume a lot of impact that your life might have on somebody else's. Everybody just kind of does what they do, and I think for having a job in music that's a real healthy foundation because it never occurs to me to see who's looking.

Favorite Artists
MJ: Are there any artists that you particularly follow or used to listen to when you were growing up?
Grant: Carole King, James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, the Beatles, the Eagles, Aretha Franklin. I love the fact that a lot of people I listened to as a kid are still doing what they do, and that's nice. I still love all their stuff.
MJ: Have you gotten a change to play with any of them of sing with any of them?
Grant: No, I've met a lot of them. J.T. was working on a project in Nashville and invited me to come down to the studio, and I've seen Bonnie a couple of times. I mean I just love watching them. I don't feel like I'm going to do a duet record or anything.

Family Framework
MJ: Did it ever occur to you to move away from all and to a big city? Was that ever a thought that crossed your mind?
Grant: Never through about it. It's not like I talk to my family every day but, you know, for all the emotional drain that being part of a big family is, it's also a great framework. I mean you don't have to get an invitation to be invited. It's just a world, you're accepted no matter what you do. I have three sisters and they are all really dear friends of mind. I just can't imagine living somewhere else. My world is really different enough from theirs as it is.
It's funny, I just did a photo shoot for a Womam's World magazine and my sisters were in the photo shoot with me. They came and we all had our hair and makeup done professionally, and one of my sisters finished and went to the Y to work out. She called me on her car phone and said, "Gosh, I look like I've been on Mars. I mean you like in the weirdest world."
MJ: Thank you for joining us today.
Grant: Thank you so much.