Copyright ©1997, ProMotion, inc.
www@acloserlook.com
If the 15 million or so people who've bought an Amy Grant album pulled out their records and CDs and listened to them, they might find something missing. They'd hear plenty of songs telling how Grant feels about her Lord -- classics like "Fatherıs Eyes," "El Shaddai" and "I Have Decided." And they'd hear favorites from pop radio like "Find a Way," "Lucky One" and "Baby Baby."
For all the fine music they'd hear, though, they might not hear much of ... Amy Grant. And that's something Grant begins to rectify with Behind the Eyes.
"I think this album, if it's anything, is about human connection," Grant says about her fifteenth album. "And I think the primary connection was for me to reconnect with myself."
Grant's songs on Behind the Eyes probe deeper than they have on previous albums. More mature, more introspective, in some cases more tentative, songs like "Every Road," "I Will Be Your Friend," and "Like I Love You" focus on working through relationships filled with scars and shards of broken hearts. "Takes a Little Time" is a love song, for sure, but it's an anomaly in this instant-gratification world of pop culture: It acknowledges that its emotions can't be contained in a brief recording, and that they won't last without a lot of work.
In retrospect, lyrics like "It takes a little time sometimes to get your feet back on the ground/It takes a little time sometimes to turn the Titanic around" seem to refer directly to Grant, who spent two and a half years writing songs for Behind the Eyes. She takes a writer's credit on 10 of the album's 12 songs; two of them -- "Missing You" and "The Feeling I Had" -- she wrote herself. These songs are personal, but not necessarily all autobiographical.
Don't assume, for instance, when Grant sings, "I'd be lying if I said I had not tried to leave a time or two" in "Every Road" that she's referring to her husband Gary Chapman.
"You might hear a song and assume that you understand what it is," she says. "But if I'm trying to capture a feeling, I might put it in the context of something thatıs more relatable."
"Missing You," for example, sounds at first listen like a breakup song. But think of the woman who sings, "I cannot hear the telephone jangle on the wall/And not feel a hopeful thrill," as someone whose child has just left home for college (which is exactly the story that initially inspired the song). It evokes a subtlety in Grant's song writing that many people -- even her biggest admirers -- don't often give her credit for.
On a musical level, Behind the Eyes has an acoustic feel that's in keeping with the personal nature of the music. Grant credits much of that to a renewed interest in playing the guitar.
"What made this record so sweet to write and to make, was that three years ago I started playing guitar again," Grant says. "I mean, like calluses on my fingers, every day playing."
Though the record still includes plenty of the synthesizers and drum programs that producer Keith Thomas favors, there are many touches of the acoustic. "Life Is a Curious Thing" features accordion and dobro; "Cry a River" has a melodica and, of all things, a pump organ. "The Feeling I Had" features Grant -- for the first time in her 20-year recording career -- playing acoustic guitar.
"When you're thinking with a guitar in your hands, I think you write things that are more immediate to how you feel," Grant says. "You pick up an acoustic guitar, and it's such a vulnerable instrument."
Whether or not it flows from her guitar, that vulnerability separates Behind the Eyes from earlier albums Grant has made.
She phrases it beautifully in a couplet from "Turn This World Around" that seems to encapsulate the album's theme:
"The hunger and the longing every one of us know inside/
Could be the bridge between us if we try."
Brian Mansfield lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and used to listen to Amy Grant play guitar at church camp when they were both much younger.
Copyright ©1997, ProMotion, inc.
www@acloserlook.com