After a considerable absence from the touring circuit, having overcome recent years of adversity, Amy Grant is once more on the road and bringing her show to Embassy Theatre on May 13. 

The six-time Grammy winner, with 26 Gospel Music Association Dove awards and more than 30 million albums sold before the streaming era, is bringing the golden age of contemporary Christian music from her home in Nashville, Tennessee, to Fort Wayne.

Making her mark

Grant’s recording career began in 1977 when she was 17. 

Through the ’80s her career trajectory followed the rise of contemporary Christian music, centered in Nashville, crossing over and making an indelible mark on pop music and popular culture across this nation. Or it may well be that the nascent pop/rock Christian music phenomenon followed her, and a few other artistic luminaries including her longtime colleague and collaborator, keyboardist and singer Michael W. Smith. 

Today, Grant is revered as a trailblazer who effortlessly crossed boundaries, piling up multi-platinum albums on the way.

Early hit songs on Christian radio, including “Father’s Eyes,” “El Shaddai,” and “Angels,” enabled her to move to a major label in the secular music world while staying connected to the Nashville Christian music scene. Her 1985 album Unguarded was a slickly produced electronic pop gem recorded with a huge roster of L.A. session musicians. 

Lead Me On, in 1988, saw her return to Nashville and work with an equally strong list of collaborators to produce an album of more acoustic textures, with a set of meditative and profoundly moving and emotional songs. 

These two albums are regarded as a high-water mark of the contemporary Christian genre, works of great artistic depth, and true classics.

Music for any occasion

Meanwhile, in 1986, her guest duet with Peter Cetera on the single “The Next Time I Fall” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. 

Grant’s unabashedly 1991 pop album Heart in Motion sold more than 5 million copies in the U.S., with a slew of hit singles on the pop charts, including “Baby Baby” and “That’s What Love Is For.”

The most enduring music in Grant’s prodigious catalog, of course, is her string of Christmas albums, beginning with 1983’s A Christmas Album. 

She has been a master interpreter of orchestrated pop standards while also establishing new ones, as singer and songwriter. Her 1992 album Home for Christmas yielded “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song)” written by Grant and British artist Chris Eaton, and her cover of David Foster and Linda Thompson’s “Grown-Up Christmas List,” which has become a standard.

With Grant’s 2000 marriage to country superstar guitarist and singer Vince Gill (in recent years seen on tour as a lead singer with the Eagles), her music changed a bit, becoming more acoustic and rustic, which fit in just fine with her gospel roots. She frequently collaborates and appears with Gill, especially around Christmas time; they held forth for 12 concerts at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville this past December.

Leaning on faith

Along the way, Grant got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, another on the Music City Walk of Fame, and an induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. But the greatest award was being given the Kennedy Center honors in Washington, D.C., in December 2022, along with George Clooney, Irish band U2, R&B singer Gladys Knight, and Cuban-American composer Tania León.

Grant’s most recent full studio albums were 2013’s How Mercy Looks from Here and 2016’s Tennessee Christmas.

In recent years, Grant has successfully come through open heart surgery, a severe injury while riding her bike, and further surgery for a rare throat condition that developed after the injury. It seems it’s taken her a couple of years of hard work, determination, and the faith that she has always claimed as her guiding light to regain her voice and stamina. Now she’s embarking on a 33-show tour across the U.S. that begins with two nights in Nashville, May 10-11, followed by the Fort Wayne show.

Last year, she released two singles. The first, “Trees We’ll Never See,” is a fitting meditation on mortality and the legacy people leave for the next generation. She wrote “What You Heard,” about family relationships and communication, set to a gentle, down-tempo arrangement of acoustic instruments with a bluegrass feel. 

There’s every indication that recording a full studio album of new songs will be the next order of business when she gets a break from the road.

You’ll likely hear those new songs at the Embassy, when Grant leads her five-piece band with the help of two backup singers. 

Her setlist can vary quite a bit with such a deep catalog to draw from. There will be lots of hits, spanning playful, breezy electronic pop, a few of her better-known covers, and perhaps her take on a classic hymn. 

There will certainly be a lot of the uplifting, inspiring songs with which she established the legacy of the contemporary Christian sound, songs that her fans know by heart.