Amy Grant sat down with Fox News anchor Shannon Bream this weekend for one of the most wide-ranging conversations she has given during this season of her career - and it covered everything from her teenage beginnings in Nashville to the personal collapse that redefined her life, all of it framed by the faith that has never left her.
The interview, which aired Sunday morning, comes as Grant promotes her first album of all-original songs in more than a decade. "The Me That Remains," released May 8, marks a return to the songwriter she was at the beginning - before the platinum records, before the crossover, before the headlines about her personal life.
She Never Thought She Was Building Something
Grant's first record came out in 1978, when she was seventeen years old. She described the beginning of her career with characteristic honesty - no fanfare, no social media, just travel and work and college juggled at the same time.
"You don't really know what's happening when you're doing it," she told Bream. "You're just waking up every day and doing what you love and your job."
She said she had no sense at the time that she was pioneering anything. Growing up in Nashville, she spent her Saturday nights at a church on Music Row that hosted live music - artists from California passing through, everyone sitting cross-legged on the floor, no ticket required. In her mind, she was simply adding to music she already loved.
"I wasn't the pioneer of anything," she said. "I loved the music that came before me. I was always there when there was ever live music, and then I was just adding to the repertoire."
The Crossover Was Never a Strategy
When her career began crossing into mainstream pop in the early 1990s, Grant said the shift never felt like a calculated move - because she had never really separated her audiences in her mind.
She grew up listening to the Beatles, Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Dan Fogelberg right alongside the gospel music her parents loved - Bill Gaither, Larnell Harris, the artists she had heard at that church coffee shop on Music Row. To her, music was simply music.
"I just assume everybody's listening to everything," she said, laughing.
Her 1991 album "Heart in Motion" went platinum five times and gave her the biggest hit of her career with "Baby Baby" - a song she said she wrote because her life was simply lighting up. She had been through serious personal challenges. She had come out the other side. She wanted to have fun.
Michael W. Smith, her longtime friend and collaborator, was deeply woven into those years. The two met through her first husband, Gary Chapman - Smith was writing with Chapman when their friendship began - and have toured and written together across decades.
The Divorce - and the Grace That Followed
Grant did not avoid the harder parts of the conversation.
Her seventeen-year marriage to Gary Chapman ended in divorce in 1999. She later married country music icon Vince Gill, with whom she has now been together for more than two decades. The period between those chapters was, by her own account, one of the most painful of her life - and one that played out in full public view.
"When you end a marriage, it was just like a car wreck that threw everybody from the car," she told Bream. "The last thing I cared about was what anybody was discussing at their dining room table. I was trying to connect with my children."
She described a moment years later, sitting on the back porch of Chapman's parents with his mother, Mary - by then already married to Gill, already with a daughter with him. Mary leaned over, patted her leg, and said: "I'm not saying divorce is the answer, but sometimes it sure helps."
Grant recalled the moment with warmth. "What a gracious thing to hear from my former mother-in-law."
For a woman whose faith community had held strong opinions about her choices, the grace that came from unexpected places - including that porch in that moment - is very much part of the story she is still telling.
Music as Shared Experience
At the center of everything Grant said on Sunday was something she has believed her whole career.
"Music is just our way to communicate shared experience," she told Bream. "Life is filled with everything. And how great to have songs about all of it."
That conviction is what shaped the crossover. It is what shaped the comeback. It is what produced "The Me That Remains" - an album written by a woman in her sixties who has survived open-heart surgery, a traumatic brain injury from a bicycle accident, and the long road back to herself.
She still has not lost the thread she started pulling at seventeen. It has just grown longer.
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