Christian Music Online

Amy Grant book Mosaic

October 23, 2007 – 9:56 am

Amy Grant Book discussion and signing: She will discuss her book Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far at Southland Christian Church at 7 p.m. Oct. 25. The event is sponsored by Joseph-Beth Booksellers, The Mall at Lexington Green; tickets are free and available at the bookstore with the purchase of the book. Books are pre-signed. (859) 273-2911. www.josephbeth.com.
Concert: Grant will perform with the Owensboro Symphony Orchestra at the Centre College Norton Center for the Arts in Danville at 8:30 p.m. Oct. 26. Tickets are $55-$85. (859) 236-4692. www.nortoncenter.com.
One of Amy Grant’s favorite stories is about philosophy and Minnie Pearl.

The country comedienne, whose real name was Sarah Cannon, asked Grant the most important color in the artist’s palette. Grant admits to mentally sprinting through the 64-color Crayola box — indigo? apricot? scarlet? — but Cannon had her own answer.

The most important color, Cannon said, was black: Black is the color that gives depth and shading. (Yes, this is the Minnie Pearl of “How-dee!” and the hat with the dangling price tag. Offstage, she was whip-smart.)

Grant is an entertainer who uses a lot of black in her book Mosaic: Pieces of My Life So Far (Doubleday/Flying Dolphin Press, $24.95), the release of which coincides with her new Greatest Hits album. It turns out that if you get Grant going for longer than the three minutes of the average song, she’s got a lot more shades of gray in her personal palette.

Grant, 47, says that blending her three kids from her first marriage with husband Vince Gill’s daughter Jenny was no picnic. She writes about the kids’ grim faces at the wedding and rails about those who assume celebrities get an effortless happily-ever-after. Blended families are tough sledding, she says, even when you’re married to your best friend.

She admits to depression and quotes Winston Churchill, calling the disease the “black dog.”

She writes about spending an afternoon with a California street person.

She even talks about what pregnancy does to a singer’s supporting muscles.

But she doesn’t have a bad word to say about her ex-husband, Christian singer Gary Chapman. Her most lacerating comments are about plants: Suffice it to say that Grant is no fan of purple thistles. You won’t be seeing this kind of trash-talking on TMZ.

Although Grant is no slouch as a singer and songwriter — having made music for 30 years, she says that if “somebody says, gee, we need a song to celebrate XYZ, I can almost say, ‘Hey, I have that song’” — the thought of writing a book was overwhelming. So was writing longhand and seeing that pages and pages of longhand translate into only a few typeset pages.

So her husband encouraged her by referring to the book, at first, as a flier. “Somehow I felt I could do that,” Grant says.

The “flier” became “the pamphlet” and then “the booklet.”

Finally it became Mosaic.

It’s not a straight autobiography, and her tour appearance this week at Lexington’s Southland Christian Church isn’t a straight concert. She’ll talk about the book, take questions and, accompanied only by her guitar, perhaps sing a song or two.

Even after three decades, Grant remains the marquee name of Christian music. She’s merged it with pop. She’s done videos that didn’t sit well with the fundamentalist crowd, although nobody will confuse her with professional video vixen Karrine Steffans. She’s been in the public eye since she was a teenager with big hair, button-down shirts and that Find a Way video, which, if you were alive in the 1980s, has burrowed its way into your consciousness, right there next to that spot occupied by Madonna crooning Live to Tell. Grant’s songs have that way about them. You know them even if you don’t think you do: Angels, Baby Baby, Find a Way, My Father’s Eyes.

Even if you’re a pagan, you know Amy Grant — by her music, which epitomized ’90s synthesizer-backed soul, and also by the Grant gossip.

For the first 20 years of her career, she was the Queen of Clean.

She was married — to Chapman, with whom she had three children — and when the pair divorced Chapman was a very public, and very vocal, reluctant ex-husband. Grant promptly married country singer Gill. She lived through gossip that her relationship with Gill torched both her marriage and his.

Google “Amy Grant” now, and you get as much about That Divorce as you do about her music.

Mosaic won’t still that controversy: “I never felt an immediate connection with another person the way I felt with Vince,” she writes. “It was, ‘I know you.’”

So, the doubters? Let ‘em talk. Grant may be on her second marriage, but she is no flashing, detoxing, custody-challenged Britney Spears. She’s not even a twice-divorced Angelina Jolie. Grant doesn’t tour as much as she used to. She still has three children at home, a place she describes as loud and lively. She’s still a fan of church music, still likes the tactile pleasure of cracking open the hymnal, still likes picking out the harmonies.

But she is in a business where image is unforgiving, where even if you do marry your best friend and live without a hint of controversy forever after, you still find yourself with a lot of explaining to do.

Grant pulls no punches about it: She remembers telling the Rev. Billy Graham that she was on her way to divorce with Chapman and offering to step aside rather than perform at one of his crusades. Graham declined, talking about the struggles of his own children.

When Grant married Gill, she got a grown-up stepdaughter and took the halting steps toward making a new family. “There’s a drudgery attached to our journey … that’s unique to ourselves,” Grant says. “Some of those steps are so awkward and painful and time-consuming, but they have to be taken.”

Grant had a fourth baby, a daughter, with Gill.

In Mosaic, the singer discusses her battles with depression, although she notes that except for four months in 1999, she hasn’t relied on antidepressant medication. “Probably my age and the circumstances of my life have softened the downward spirals for me, but winter is still a struggle every year,” she writes. “Maybe subconsciously that is part of the reason I’ve made so much Christmas music — to focus on hope and joy and store up a lot of good thoughts for the dark months ahead.”

And Grant has a favorite moment that she doesn’t mention in the book. It’s an image of an artist at peace with herself: It was on her second visit to Paul Newman’s Camp Hole in the Wall in Connecticut. The late actor Christopher Reeve was there, in his wheelchair, and it was a serene autumn day, Grant recalled. Reeve asked Grant to play something. Grant had her guitar, and her friend Ruth had a violin. They played the lilting Ashokan Farewell, the theme song from Ken Burns The Civil War television series.

Grant describes it as “the highlight of unexpected moments.”

Mosaic is about those unexpected moments — how, even after 30 years of touring and singing about faith and talking about gossip, it’s the music that still drives the moment.

EXCERPT

From ‘Mosaic’ by Amy Grant

“I remember making a plan on a Sunday morning years ago for our family to visit a new church. My children were young — Sarah still in diapers. … Sarah was fed, dressed, and ready. While I was checking on Mat and Millie, Sarah got ahold of a slice of toast with grape jelly. By the time I found her, the dress had to go. A wet towel took care of sticky hands. The problem with outfit number two was sudden diarrhea. A wet towel was not going to fix this one. After a bath and outfit number three, I finally got us to the car. As I was struggling with the straps of the car seat … I imagined that this might resemble God’s experience with me. He knows where he wants to take me, and he’ll get me there, in spite of myself

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