1985: The Pinnacle Year

The first post of 2025 looks back 40 years and remembers the year that might have forever changed the direction of spiritual music.

I’ve been incredibly excited to move into 2025 simply because so many of my favorite albums celebrate anniversaries this year—anywhere from 60 to 30 years!

At the center of what you’ll read about this year, though, is 1985. Everything that came ahead of it helped create it and everything that came after was a result of it. It was an all-too-brief window where innovative artists were breaking the rules that dictated where, when and who Christian music was intended to reach. On a personal level, no year has impacted me more. Much of what I believe about being an artist of faith came from the things that I read, heard and witnessed during the 12 months of that year.

In 1983 and 1984, contemporary Christian and gospel music were experiencing the same explosion that pop music was. Billboard reported that Sparrow Records had seen their sales rise by 31% in 1983 alone. Christian music surpassed the sales of both jazz and classical music and the major secular labels were taking note. 1984 produced albums on the cutting edge of this new cohort of Christian artists who were writing about their faith in relatable and clever ways against the backdrop of state-of-the-art production. While Steve Taylor’s Meltdown, Sheila Walsh’s Triumph in the Air and Rez Band’s Hostage may not have been the most-played albums on your local Christian radio station, young people were buying the albums in significant numbers. Their videos were also breaking through on secular video programming, finding new ears and eyes—some who may not have even realized they were listening to Christian music.

Me in 1985 with my sister, Hillary, and Kathy Troccoli at a record signing at Uncle Al’s United in Spirit Bookstore.

At the forefront, undoubtedly, was Amy Grant—an artist doe-eyed enough to endear Christian listeners, but gutsy enough to not put off people listening to Top 40 radio. 1982’s Age to Age was certified platinum in 1984 and that year’s Straight Ahead was quickly heading in that direction. Despite being highly criticized (by the same fans who had helped Age to Age go platinum) for her ambitious ideas and methods, she maintained an intellectual grounding that made her reasons for wanting to be in the mainstream clear. Christianity Today quoted her as saying,

“There is a group of Christian artists who want to devote their lives to writing the music for the church in the 1980s—the new worship music, the praise music, and the family music. But I also feel like there’s a group of us who…want to be a voice in our culture.”

As 1984 turned into 1985, secular artists like Philip Bailey and Deniece Williams were releasing albums or making plans to release albums for the CCM market, intending for their pop audiences to follow them as they further revealed themselves, sharing not just their ideas about love, but life through a faith-based lens. Christian culture did not fully embrace these artists. After all, their reality as pop artists who happened to be Christians presented a possibility that many of the gatekeepers wished to stultify. To accept these artists would have meant that years of Christian separatism which prohibited artists from being “in the world” was an error. With a number of Christian artists (like Tramaine Hawkins, Leslie Phillips, Kathy Troccoli and Russ Taff) being acclaimed by critics as having potential to join them on the pop side, it presented a theological and commercial conundrum that produced some of the most interesting, intellectually challenging and musically interesting art to emerge from the CCM and gospel genres.

So as 2025 progresses, you’ll be reading features that will celebrate some of the spectacular art that this period birthed. I wanted to share some of the features that I’ve written about albums from this year to help build context for all that you will read over the course of the next 12 months.

Unguarded

No album stirred the Christian pot of controversy more than Amy Grant’s Unguarded did. This article explores the building of Amy’s career and the moment in which Unguarded was presented to the world.

Fall Down (Spirit of Love)

Tramaine Hawkins’ contemporary era is (more often than not) disregarded by a younger generation that sees The Clark Sisters’ “You Brought the Sunshine” as the central crossover moment of gospel music. But Tramaine had the bigger hit (#1 on Billboard’s Dance Chart, thank you very much!) and took a massive risk by being willing to go into the clubs and the mainstream avenues that having such a large hit afforded her. This article documents that story with quotes from many of her collaborators from this much-overlooked chapter of her career.

Voices in the Wind

Not every artist in this era was trying to carve out a slice of life in pop music. Teri DeSario had already been there, done that, and was very much enjoying writing about her theological and ideological journey as a new Christian. Her embrace, however, of Christian mystics and feminism, however, went against the grain of the new world she was inhabiting. To show just how different the times were, she somehow managed to score a half dozen Christian radio hits and a Grammy nomination with two albums that said things no one in Christian music had said before or has said since. I interviewed Teri for my undergraduate thesis about the experiences of women in CCM and repurposed our interview for this piece.

Also!

The January 2025 edition of my Church of the Good Groove playlist is now up! Just click here to listen!