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 “How Do We Get There From Here,” a song forged after the tragic 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville. Both Grant and Amanfu were part of an artist group that visited the Tennessee State Capitol in fall 2023 to talk about gun control. On their new collaboration, they wrestle with themes including accountability, communication and grief.
“A lot of artists and songwriters were invited to go and just say, ‘Is there anything we can use our platform to help shift?’” Grant says. “After being there [and] meeting with legislature on both sides, I thought ‘How does anybody get anything done?’ But I think so many times schools of thought or a change in the way someone sees something come[s] through the arts.”
After writing the first verse and chorus, she reconnected with Amanfu about their experience. “It took a year of us just trading text[s]. We were both working very hard, both traveling. Then she reached out and was like, ‘I think I’ve got the song.’ I was going into the studio that week and asked if she was in town. It was just like our orbits were so different but for a minute the planets aligned. And I’ve so enjoyed getting to know her.”
Gill joins on “Friend Like You,” Smith co-wrote “The Saint,” and Grant’s daughters Corrina and Sarah Cannon join on the album closer “The Other Side of Goodbye,” which centers on the loss of Grant’s mother, who passed away in 2011.
“The other side of goodbye can be all kinds of things, but at some point I just thought about my mom,” Grant says. “I don’t know that many people that have died that I’ve actually been in the room with — a few — but I wanted to capture the experience of being a witness to her crossing over. And that day changed the way I look at death. I was like, ‘We’ve got to reframe this.’ I said, ‘When somebody finishes their life, can we high-five them?’ And with everything in life, how you frame it has a lot to do with how you experience it.”
The Me That Remains had been finished for around six months or so when Grant and her team partnered with Thirty Tigers to release the project.
“I think we were trying to find a partner that was really interested in creating conversation. That really seems to be the focus on Thirty Tigers, just bringing together people through the arts. I’ve so enjoyed talking to [Thirty Tigers co-founder/president] David Macias and everyone has been great. It just feels a little bit kind of maverick.”
Though Grant’s new album ends a 13-year dearth of new music from the Gospel Music Hall of Famer and 2022 Kennedy Center honoree, she says she doubts it will take another 13 years before she creates new music.
“I don’t know that I’ve got a whole record right now, but I have a lot of songs I’m working on. People have sent me some beautiful songs.”
