LOS ANGELES (AP) — Amy Grant has spent decades resisting the labels placed on her music. In a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press, the 65-year-old singer said her new album, “The Me That Remains,” out Friday, reflects a creative re-entry that began during recovery after a serious bicycle accident in 2022 that resulted in traumatic brain injury.
Grant told the AP that she started writing again “Two summers ago” and described the experience as a return to a part of herself she said had gone quiet. She said the act of writing felt “so good,” and she connected that return to having progressed far enough in physical healing that “it’s all lining back up,” while also acknowledging that recovery can change how a person experiences daily life.
Asked whether she is fully healed, Grant said there are “things that are different,” and she pointed to conversations within her family about how she has changed. She said she has a niece who told her, “God, I think I like you better now,” and Grant added that her own processing has become different, even as she described herself as being in “great physical health.” She said balance improvements have come gradually, telling the AP that “Just in the last year my balance is so much better,” and that she got back on a bicycle in a “very safe environment” two weeks before the interview.
Grant said the album’s emotional foundation is tied to the accident and the long recovery that followed. She described the first lyric as emerging from the moment she felt she was being drawn back into her creative self—an entrance she framed as an acceptance that she was “not who you used to be, but you are somebody.”
The interview also addressed why Grant said she keeps returning to faith while making music that can be darker than what some listeners expect. On the subject of going “dark,” she said, “I go dark sometimes,” and she argued that songwriting honesty serves as an ongoing invitation to show up as herself. She said, “To me, the superpower of music is that it connects you, first and foremost, to yourself, and then to others, to God,” adding “Why pretend?” and saying she does not want a person’s public presentation to diverge sharply from what she described as what is “in here.”
Grant also talked about a song on the album, “The 6th of January (Yasgur’s Farm),” in which she sings, “I hear the words John Lennon said / Asking me to imagine.” She said the track she discussed is connected to songwriter Sandy Lawrence’s long gestation for the piece, telling the AP that there are “a few songs on the record” that she did not write but that she has loved for a long time. Grant said Lawrence, who wrote and developed the song, “worked on that song for 15 years,” and she said that it was only after the Jan. 6 episode at the U.S. Capitol that Lawrence’s work “turned the creative juices” toward its final direction.
In discussing what she sees in the broader world, Grant said there is “a lot going on” and that human communities have long experienced what she described as “man’s inhumanity to man.” She said she tries each day to remind herself of what she called the “amazing power” individuals have to affect the world through daily choices. Grant told the AP that people sometimes need to “take a lot of deep breaths” and sit with unrest, saying the pendulum swings but sometimes “at the cost of a lot of life,” while she added that even in difficult moments, “there’s always something good happening.”
AP asked Grant about her relationship with Christian labels, noting that in her career some have sought to define her that way even as others have rejected it at different points. Grant said she has long resisted being “pegged” and described how the way she is introduced can discourage potential listeners, adding that curiosity is what makes people “lean in.” She said that she is staking everything on the idea that “it’s God who finds us,” and she described her personal faith journey as one that has included moments outdoors under stormy skies and other times when she has questioned where she is truly reaching.