Amy Grant Opens Up About Her First Album in 13 Years, ‘The Me That Remains’: ‘In a Beautiful Way, Our Limitations Create Our Path’
Categoria: Musica
The multiple Grammy winner created her new album with help from Vince Gill, Mac McAnally, Ruby Amanfu and others.
Por Billboard | 06/05/2026
In 2024, six-time Grammy winner Amy Grant was clearing out and organizing a room in her Nashville home after her daughter Corrina had made an observation. “She just said, ‘Where’s your creative space?’” Grant recalls. The room, filled with paintings she’d made, art supplies, Grant’s collection of 45s and an old turntable, became her new creative oasis. “My daughter nicknamed the space ‘craftopia,’” Grant says. Following the release of her self-titled debut in 1977, Grant become one of the leading artists who popularized Contemporary Christian music in the 1980s and 1990s, with such albums as Age to Age and Heart in Motion reaching broader audiences. She earned crossover hits like the Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Baby Baby” and has collected over two dozen GMA Dove Awards. But by 2024, it had been over a decade since her last album of original music, 2013’s How Mercy Looks From Here . Grant had been touring, but also spent the past few years weathering serious health issues, including undergoing open-heart surgery in 2020 and healing from a bicycle accident in 2022 that resulted in a traumatic brain injury. In that new creative space, Grant sat down and began writing lyrics that became the title track and emotional fulcrum for her new album The Me That Remains , which comes out Friday (May 8) on Thirty Tigers. The song’s frank lyrics such as “Life cut me wide open when my head hit the ground/ Wasn’t my time for dying” take an honest look at Grant’s healing over the past few years, as well as her determination to make the most of every stage of life. “The very first lyric I wrote for this record, I thought it was a poem, but at that time I was having pretty substantial short-term memory issues,” Grant says. “Lyrics were easy because it’s written down, but music is tough. So I said, ‘I don’t think I can do this by myself.’ But in a beautiful way, our limitations create our path.” She began reaching out to writers and fellow artists, including her husband Vince Gill, in addition to Michael W. Smith, Tom Douglas, Mike Reid and Mac McAnally, the 10-time CMA musician of the year winner also known for his work as part of Jimmy Buffett’s Coral Reefer band. By January 2025, she had returned to the studio with the intention of only recording a couple of songs. “It felt so organic and like, ‘Man, that was fun. I haven’t done that in a long time,” she says. She called upon McAnally and they agreed to work on recording songs when they could, heading into the studio here and there over the course of a few months. “At one point he said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a record here. We have 10 songs.’ I guess it was as much of a surprise to me that it emerged the way it did, and it was without any work pressure.” Though the album includes personal songs such as “The Me That Remains,” and mature looks at relationships on tunes like “‘Til We Get It Right,” the album also takes nuanced looks at society and the state of the world. Grant teamed with Ruby Amanfu on “Ho