Heart in Motion is the 1991 album that broke Amy Grant into the mainstream pop-music charts, yielding five top 20 singles and two No. 1 hits ("Baby Baby" and "Every Heartbeat"). But while the release is filled with upbeat beboppin' singles, it also displays a more serious side and a depth of songwriting ability from Christian music's first lady. The urgent "Ask Me" introduces you to a sexually abused girl who miraculously grips tightly to her faith while struggling through a difficult history, while "I Will Remember You" and "How Can We See That Far" are haunting ballads dripping with echo-laden guitars. Indeed, Grant showcases a wide variety of sounds and flavors on this, her multiplatinum introduction to the secular music world. --Michael Lyttle
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You have to admire Amy Grant. She has always resisted the temptation to exactly fulfill the expectations of a Christian music market which tends to prefer the safe, the jargonistic, and the predictable. Rather, she has continually pushed the boundaries of Christian artistry outward. In that regard her 12th album, Heart in Motion, does not disappoint.
Lets get right to the first question: Is this a Christian album? The immediate answer is no, it is not a contemporary gospel album. But if you ask if the lyrics express Christian values and whether its clear from listening to the album that Amy Grant believes in Jesus Christ (rather than in a capitalized pronoun), the answer is clearly yes.
There is no question, however, that this album was made with the mainstream pop market in mind. The first six cuts in particular sport memorable hooks and polished, radio-ready production. Brown Bannister, who produced all of Grants previous albums, is back again on four of the songs, but big time L.A. producer Michael Omartian was brought in for five others and rising star Keith Thomas for two.
In fact, it is the two Thomas productions which lead off the album "Good for Me" and "Baby Baby" (the latter dedicated, Grant says in the liner notes, "to Millie, whose six-week-old face was my inspiration"). These two sings, in which only Jerry McPherson's guitars augment Thomas synths, sound big and bright rather than brittle and mechanized. Next comes the rollicking "Every Heartbeat," produced by Bannister, which features the killer drum/bass duo if Chris McHugh and Tommy Sims with McPherson again on guitar and Charlie Peacock on keyboards, all backed by fun 50's style bgvs. (Peacock, who co-wrote the song with Grant and Wayne Kirkpatrick, also contributed to the horn arrangements.) What follows is the Big Ballad, and Omartian-produced masterpiece called "That's What Love is For" which has "hit" written all over it....
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