Contemporary Christian and pop music singer Amy Grant and her Country Music Hall of Fame husband Vince Gill like to schedule their tours at the same time so they can relax together when they’re back home in Nashville.
Sometimes their separate agents end up booking them in the same cities and venues, Grant said. Which is why both will soon be appearing in Bakersfield’s Fox Theater just a few days apart.
And it will be ladies first, as Grant performs for the San Joaquin Community Hospital Foundation’s 2008 Gala fundraiser Saturday, and Gill shines on the same stage Oct. 23 as part of his Vince Gill Acoustic Tour.
AMY
San Joaquin Hospital Foundation director Mimi Audelo is especially excited about Grant’s visit.
“She is a good fit for our organization,” Audelo said, adding that Grant would be “good for the community.”
As, no doubt, will be the hospital’s long-awaited burn center scheduled to open in December, which will benefit directly from the fundraiser’s proceeds, Audelo said.
“I’m thrilled,” is how Grant, during a phone interview, described her feeling about helping to raise funds for the center, which will include a five-bed intensive care unit and an outpatient office.
“I know that people are losing their jobs” in today’s troubled economy, she said, “but many people aren’t and I know those are the people who are buying tickets.”
Grant’s concert Saturday will be part of her “Lead Me On” 20th Anniversary Celebration Tour, which is named for her 1988 platinum album. “It’s truly a one-time opportunity for me to do my old songs,” the five-time Grammy winner said, particularly those from her first 10 years as a recording artist, 1978 to 1988.
That first decade was a purer, more innocent time for her and it was reflected in her music, Grant said. “The message got diluted when I went after pop radio. You can just tell I wrote these songs when no one was looking.”
Her feeling behind her upcoming concert’s theme is, “Let’s look back and remind ourselves of who we were before we lived so much life, before we were impassioned and made so many mistakes. And with the gift of looking back, let’s move ahead.”
But the audience can also expect two or three of Grant’s new songs and some encores as well. “I am wide open to anyone shouting out a song,” she said.
She might even do a new one she just wrote called “Find,” Grant said.
“What would they find if they uncovered all of my tracks?...Secrets and so much more,” the song says.
“We will find what we’re looking for in each other,” Grant said. “We’ll find the good, we’ll find the bad, because it’s present in all of us.”
The song sometimes makes her think of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, for whom Grant has felt a lot of compassion — Christian female role model to Christian female role model — since Palin was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight following her nomination.
“I don’t remember ever being so compelled to pray for somebody,” Grant said about Palin, although she says she makes it a point to pray for national leaders in general. “I wake up in the morning and just pray for all of them.”
VINCE
“I’m probably not as devoted to prayer as my wife is,” said Grant’s 19-Grammy-winning husband. “I have more of a common-sense approach to life than Amy does, based more on hoping that people do the right thing.
“In my view, what’s going on in our country,” Gill said, referring to the financial chaos happening during this election year, “is that we need to look at ourselves for the answers to the problems rather than pointing the finger at Washington. I think the mirror would be a good place to look. People want more stuff than they can afford,” he said, but “none of the politicians would be crazy enough to say anything like that” because it would cost them votes.
“I wish everybody would embrace everybody and say, ‘Let’s do what’s best for everybody instead of what’s best for me,’” Gill said.
Such casual, good-spirited honesty, combined with an unexpected sense of humor, makes Gill popular with his fans. They’ll get to see this very informal side of him during his concert on Oct. 23, which he described as “the opposite of show business.”
“It’s an acoustic show,” he said. “Me and three musicians, we sit down and there’s no set list.
There’s no plan. It winds down to what people want to hear. It’s very informal. I talk a lot of how the songs were made. We’ll do some new songs.”
And, yes, he too will take requests from the audience — “As long as I know how to play the song,” he quipped.
His tour is taking Gill to 42 cities in four months. There are a few two-week respites for going back to Nashville between strings of shows, but “it’s no fun” being away from home and his and Amy’s kids, Gill said.
He’s excited about coming to Bakersfield, however.
“It’s one of my favorite places to play,” he said, because some of his biggest country music heroes, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, come from here.
“Bakersfield has a real honored place in my heart for this kind of music. I think some of the best country music came out of Bakersfield. I was as drawn to Buck and Merle as any other artist that came along.”
Christian Music News Source
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