Amy Grant's Straight Ahead: A 40th Anniversary Tribute
A deep dive into the Grammy and Dove Award winning, gold-selling album that helped change the landscape of contemporary Christian music.
There aren’t many years like 1984 in terms of pop music. It was like a geyser had burst. Prince’s Purple Rain, Van Halen’s 1984, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Tina Turner’s Private Dancer and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA were just a few of the albums that hit the market, selling millions of copies each, all contributing their distinct sounds to make up what one Billboard writer called “pop music’s best year ever.”
What was happening in the general market, was also happening in contemporary Christian music. 1984 saw the release of game-changing albums like Steve Taylor’s Meltdown, Sheila Walsh’s Triumph in the Air, Leon Patillo’s The Sky Is the Limit, Leslie Phillips’ Dancing with Danger, Kathy Troccoli’s Heart and Soul, and The Winans’ Tomorrow. For the first time since its invention, contemporary Christian music was selling more units than classical and jazz, and secular labels were beginning to pay attention. Leading the pack was Amy Grant, an artist that, up until 1982, some Christian music industry insiders had “attach[ed] doubts to her credibility as an artist,” according to a feature in Contemporary Christian Music magazine that year.
Her transition from teen artist to adult artist had been challenging. She scored her first bonafide hit with 1979’s “My Father’s Eyes,” a song that positioned her as Christian music’s new sweetheart. “That’s not anything like my own self-concept,” she frankly told the Fresno Bee’s Doug Hoagland. “Sweetheart is such a funny word…As long as I tried to be that sweetheart, I wouldn’t relate to anyone.”
Her 1980 album, Never Alone, however, released as she was turning twenty, received an uncertain reaction from her fan base. She was coming of age and it was reflected in weighty compositions like “So Glad” and “If I Have to Die,” and she was experimenting with a more modern sound with tunes like “Walking Away with You” and “Too Late” which employed synthesizers and electric guitars turned up in the mix. Conservative listeners recoiled. They thought the music sounded “druggy,” but Grant pressed on. She released two live albums in 1981 with the edgy DeGarmo and Key as her backing band, seeking a balance between what fans had come to expect and where she saw herself heading.
But when Age to Age hit two years later, it was, for anyone who liked the edgier direction of Never Alone, both a step back and a step forward. Recorded at Caribou Ranch in Colorado, Age to Age may have been the most state of the art production contemporary Christian music had encountered since Reba Rambo’s 1979 album The Prodigal…According to Reba. Rambo had utilized a combination of Los Angeles and Nashville’s top studio players and session singers, recorded at the same studios as her pop and R&B counterparts, and with Age to Age, Grant had done the same. From a production standpoint, Age to Age stood shoulder to shoulder with the best adult contemporary music produced in 1982. The album won Grant her first Grammy Award and broke contemporary Christian music sales records, holding the #1 position on Billboard’s Inspirational LPs chart for 85 weeks, ultimately reaching gold certification–the first album of the genre to earn an official RIAA certification–by February of 1984.
In 1983, capitalizing on the success of the album, Myrrh Records released a seven inch single, Ageless Medley, which was an eight-song medley of Grant’s greatest hits up to that point. Closing with electrified rearrangements of “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” (composed by Rich Mullins) and “I Have Decided” (both hits from Age to Age), the medley, arranged by Michael W. Smith, revealed the rapid evolution occurring in terms of her musical direction. In addition to earning a Grammy, Billboard estimated that Ageless Medley sold more than 100,000 copies.
The same year, while continuing to tour, she began working on two new albums at the same time. The first to be released was A Christmas Album. It was another leap beyond Age to Age. With tunes like the “Emmanuel/Little Town” suite, Grant was moving towards a less staid, more energetic form of pop/rock that was more in line with the kind of music that other twenty-three-year-olds like herself were listening to in the real world. She told the New York’s Daily News, “I like Dan Fogelberg and I love Jennifer Holliday’s Feel My Soul. I listen to George Winston, Dave Grusin, people like that.”1
As she and her team worked on the new albums, she was courted by at least one secular label who saw her potential. She opted to stay with Myrrh, the label that had first signed her, but told The Tennessean,
“Life basically is a series of springboards. Last year, what really hit me is that it’s the wise person who figures out when to stop springing. I realized that, for me, the soul of my music is in the fact that I sing because of God’s inspiration. When I was courted by other labels, I thought ‘This is a great springboard. Where do you want to go?’ And I decided that I didn’t want to leave the board I’m on now. But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop growing.”
In this new moment of creative and professional expansion, collaborations, primarily with her then-husband Gary Chapman and singer-songwriter-musician Michael W. Smith, changed the ways she’d been writing. She told Musicline in 1985,
“When I first started writing, I would rarely use my pen and paper and I would sit at my guitar and write the music and the lyrics. I would just sing it a line at a time. It just came altogether. I feel like I write a song word by word now. Which for me is more exciting….I realized pretty quickly that my lack of skill on an instrument could keep me from writing a good song…What I started doing was collaborating with musicians like Michael W. Smith and my husband Gary. Michael would sit down at the piano and I would say ‘Don’t give me a melody… Don’t lock me in but you give me a chord progression and let me work with it.’”
One of the earliest songs from those collaborations was “Where Do You Hide Your Heart,” which Grant started “trying out” on audiences during the Age to Age tour in 1983. Smith had given Grant an instrumental demo with what would become known as the song’s synthesizer driven introduction set against a drum track. Grant wrote lyrics counterpoint to Smith’s instrumental hook, creating a melody that diverted from the obvious place to go. She recalled to Contemporary Christian Music magazine in a 1986 interview, “For me, that was a new era of writing. I don’t know how, but I think I crossed a bridge musically. It’s quite unexplainable. Also, that song is just so simple. I get a lot of strength when I sing it to myself.”
The song articulated the essence of what the next chapter of Amy’s career would be about: vulnerability. Speaking to a hurting friend in the lyric, she doesn’t seek to erase the emotional pain, but rather to simply remind her friend that they are not alone. Faith is posited as a companion, not a cure-all. An early live performance of the song was captured on film during the Age to Age tour shows the song still in its infancy as Grant and her band were working out the structure. The final version, recorded that same year, for Straight Ahead is tighter with top-tier session musicians like Robbie Buchanan, Dann Huff and Paul Liem giving the song the perfect amount of gloss to make it radio-ready without robbing it of its grit.
It’s the change in Grant’s voice that is the most startling. The vocal growth between Age to Age and Straight Ahead was significant. Grant would credit Donna McElroy, who began touring with and coaching Grant in 1983, with “teaching me [how to let] what’s in my heart to come out my mouth.”2 The softness that had dominated her early recordings was still present, but far more pronounced was a girth that had not existed previously. When Straight Ahead was unleashed in early 1984, fans and critics were astounded by what they heard. CCM critic Caroline Ameda wrote in her review of the album, “Her voice cuts like a sabre where she once would have slid, strikes like a cobra where she once would have drawled, and growls like a wildcat where she once would have squealed.”
While Straight Ahead was abundant with radio-ready singles for Christian radio, like “Angels,” “Jehovah,” “Thy Word,” and the Rich Mullins-penned “Doubly Good to You,” there was also a bounty of songs that signaled Amy’s interest in communicating with the general market. The album’s title track was an exquisite power ballad that spoke to the uncertainty any twenty-something person might have been experiencing in 1984. Citing the controversial, unnamed “you” as the source of inspiration, “Straight Ahead” is a perfect example of the kinds of songs that Grant foresaw making an impact outside of Christian circles. She explained to music journalist Bob Darden in a feature in the Waco Tribune in 1983,
“When I write–or choose to sing–a song, my main objective is to do something that anybody can hear. I just try to write for people…I’m just trying to sing a picture of life that people can relate to….Not all Christian songs need to be evangelical. Some can minister just by being companionable.” “I think with Straight Ahead,” she reminisced in CCM magazine in 1986, “I started to realize that my strength in songwriting was simplicity.”
Most controversial was “Open Arms,” an innocent ballad about an embrace, one that could be literal or metaphorical, just as the “you” in the song could have been God, a friend or a lover. The ambiguity was noted by critics inside and outside of the Christian world. Jon Marlowe from the Miami News was struck by “the sheer magic and beauty of Grant’s voice [that] grabs you right by the heart, then just rips it to shreds. Grant may be singing about the Lord, but you could still dump ‘Open Arms’ onto any truck-stop jukebox and level every soul in the place, stopping them right in mid-coffee as they remember the one true love they left behind…and shouldn’t have.” From Marlowe’s standpoint, the broad way the song could be interpreted was a good thing, but for the flocks in fundamentalist battlestations, the ambiguity was a sell-out, a softening of the gospel. But of anything on Straight Ahead, “Open Arms” was most indicative of where she was going.
“I don’t want to compartmentalize; I think that would be a mistake. To say ‘This song is just for Christians,’ or ‘This song is for those people who aren’t saved’ is to walk on tricky ground. I can’t begin to guess where people are in their lives,” she explained to Bob Darden.
The album’s closer, “The Now and the Not Yet,” written by CCM pioneer Pam Mark Hall, was one of the last tracks to be recorded for the album, but most succinctly relays the centrality of belief in Grant’s intention, the thread that connects the range of stories and experiences in her music. It also speaks to the largeness of God, which transcends our limited understanding of what is sacred or secular, what represents or does not represent God, and the human’s role in embodying and conveying God in the world. “The main thing to realize,” she said in 1983, “is that God is forever; we just happen to be along at this particular small time in eternity. I’ve been hit with the fact that God is still the sovereign God, whether we choose to realize it or not.”3
Months after the album’s release, Grant would sell out New York City’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Universal Amphitheater, unseat her own Age to Age from the #1 spot on Billboard’s Inspirational LPs chart, and be branded “The Michael Jackson of Gospel Music” by the New York Times. While 1985’s Unguarded was seen as her break-out moment (and, in so many ways, it was), Straight Ahead was the album that helped Grant and her team craft her sound, message and approach towards an audience that had no relationship with contemporary Christian music.
In this week’s podcast episode, which serves as a companion to this feature, I am joined by Dr. Leah Payne whose book God Gave Rock and Roll To You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music comes out this week. We discuss Leah’s book, all things Amy (of course!) and share our personal thoughts and memories about this classic album. If you aren’t following the podcast on Spotify or Apple Music, just click here to follow AND listen!
For paid subscribers, I have uploaded a rare interview with Amy and Steve Taylor on a talk show during Dove week in 1985 from my personal VHS archive! To upgrade your subscription, just click here! The interview can be accessed in the post below.
I leave you this week with an Amy bonus. Imagine my surprise, as a nighttime soap watching kid, when Lisa Hartman’s character Cathy Geary sang “Jehovah” from Straight Ahead on Knots Landing in 1985!
Hinckley, David, “The Divinely Inspired Amy Grant,” Daily News, Oct. 7, 1984, pg. 20.
Mandell, Jonathan, “Keeping the Faith,” Newsday, Sept. 30, 1988, pg. 5.
Darden, Bob, “Amy Grant to Play Waco Hall, Waco Tribune, Feb. 20, 1983, pg. 71, Web.
Not an artist I know well. I loved following the evolution of her music--and her voice! Now as a paid subscriber I am off to listen to the bonus interview!