Amy Grant in Concert 13

"stay for a while" in concert plus intro to a new song
Irvine, CA 10/17/08
Go see Amy Grant Lead Me on Reunion Tour www.amygrant.com

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Tickets Still Available For Sunday’s Amy Grant Concert and Family Y Fundraiser

Augusta native, Amy Grant will perform at First Tee, Sunday, October 12th. It’s a fundraiser for the Family Y. The event is also an attempt to be inducted into the Guinness Book Of World Records for the world’s largest family picnic. There are tickets still available.

Christian Music News Source

Vince Gill, Amy Grant coming to Coliseum for Christmas show

BLOOMINGTON -- The holiday music scene just got a little merrier with the addition of “Christmas with Vince and Amy” to the U.S. Cellular Coliseum’s December slate. | Interactive graphic: Coliseum attendance, revenues, events

Featuring the husband-wife duo of country singer Vince Gill and former Christian pop queen Amy Grant, the concert is slated for 8 p.m. Dec. 20.

Tickets are priced at $39.50 to $59.50, and go on sale at 10 a.m. Oct. 18 at the Coliseum box office and area Ticketmaster locations.

Also available at that time will be a special $159.50 ticket that includes admission to a pre-show reception attended by Grant and Gill. Also featured will be dinner and drinks, a signed memorabilia raffle and premium floor seating for the concert.

A portion of the reception’s proceeds will go to support Bloomington’s Clare House food pantry.

In addition to Grant and Gill, the concert will feature a 12-piece band that includes a horn section and Gill’s daughter, Jenny, serving as harmony vocalist.

Showcased will be songs from Grant’s recently released album, “The Holiday Collection,” featuring songs from her previous holiday albums, along with four new songs, one of them — “Baby It’s Christmas” — co-penned by Gill.

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Vince Gill & Amy Grant coming to U.S. Cellular Coliseum

U.S. Cellular Coliseum has announced that Vince Gill and Amy Grant will perform a special Christmas show on Saturday, December 20th at 8 p.m. Tickets for 'Christmas with Vince and Amy' will go on sale on Saturday, October 18th. Tickets range from $39.50 to $59.50.

The coliseum will also host an exclusive pre-show reception with Vince Gill and Amy Grant for $159.50, with a portion of the proceeds going to the Clare House of Bloomington.

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Amy Grant, Vince Gill Launch 15-Date Christmas Tour Dec. 4

Amy Grant and Vince Gill will embark on a 15-date Christmas With Amy & Vince Tour Dec. 4, in Manchester, NH, and bring it home Dec. 22 and 23 with two shows in Nashville at the Ryman Auditorium.

“The job of spreading Christmas cheer has simply gotten too big for Santa and Rudolph to do alone,” Gill explains. “So Amy and I are pitching in. Besides, these holiday tours have become our favorites.”

Grant agrees: “Christmas audiences are special. They tend to involve the whole family, and their emotions are a wonderful mix of anticipation and reverence. It’s a thrilling experience for both of us.”

In their two hour program of cherished standards and newer seasonal fare, the Grammy-winning husband-and-wife team will be backed by a 12-piece band that features a horn section and two harmony singers, one of whom is Gill’s daughter, Jenny. “Some of our earlier Christmas tours were with a symphony orchestra,” Gill notes. “This time, though, we wanted to create more of an intimate, living room feel.” Plans are underway to work with local charities in order to give back to these communities.

On Sept. 30, Grant will release her first new Christmas album in nine years. Called The Christmas Collection, it is made up of selections from her three earlier Christmas CDs—plus four new tunes, including “Baby It’s Christmas,” a song Grant and Gill wrote together. Keeping with the festive mood, Grant will tape on Nov. 11 an NBC-TV special, Holiday Celebration On Ice. It co-stars Michael W. Smith and a corps of world-famous skating champions and will air Nov. 30.

One of the most beloved and respected performers in American music, Gill was inducted last year into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He is a long-time member of the Grand Ole Opry and winner of 19 Grammy awards. Gill boasts three best-selling Christmas albums of his own: Let There Be Peace On Earth, Breath Of Heaven and Christmas Collection.

Here are the dates, cities and venues for Christmas With Amy & Vince:

Dec. 4 Manchester, NH/Verizon Wireless Arena

Dec. 5 Augusta, ME/Augusta Civic Center

Dec. 6 West Point, NY/Eisenhower Hall Theatre

Dec. 7 Mashantucket, CT/MGM Grand Theatre at Foxwoods

Dec. 10 Baltimore, MD/Lyric Opera House

Dec. 11 Albany, NY/Times Union Center

Dec. 12 Worcester, MA/DCU Center

Dec. 13 Elmira, NY/First Arena

Dec. 15 Atlanta, GA/Fox Theatre

Dec. 16 Charlotte, NC/Ovens Auditorium

Dec. 18 Grand Rapids, MI/Van Andel Arena

Dec. 19 St. Louis, MO/Scottrade Center

Dec. 20 Bloomington, IL/US Cellular Colliseum

Dec. 22 & 23 Nashville, TN/Ryman Auditorium

Christian Music News Source

6 Questions With Amy Grant

Few artists, if any, have had a more powerful impact on the Christian music industry than Amy Grant. She burst on the scene as a fresh-faced teen who helped define the contemporary Christian genre before becoming a pop crossover success with such hits as "Baby Baby" and "Every Heartbeat."

After 30 years with Word, the six-time Grammy Award winner signed with EMI Christian Music Group last year, which recently issued a 20th-anniversary edition of her landmark "Lead Me On" album. She'll embark on a reunion tour this fall that features most of the band that accompanied her on the original "Lead Me On" trek. She's also promoting "The Christmas Collection," which hit the streets Sept. 30. And, she and husband Vince Gill will embark on a Christmas tour around the holidays.

Did you have any idea "Lead Me On" would have such lasting significance?

No. When you're recording, you're just hoping someone will listen to it then. I remember just thinking, "I'm not going to be one of those women that's just way past her prime and if I'm still singing when I'm 40, somebody get a hook and come drag me offstage." That's how I felt in my 20s, but then you get to be in your 40s and go, "I've got so much more to say now."

What was going on in your life at that time that is reflected on "Lead Me On"?

I was pregnant with [my first child] Matt and my grandmother had just died. I was wrestling with facing some more adult issues. [Ex-husband] Gary [Chapman] and I had been married five years, which is long enough to have gone through some rough patches. I had just realized that life can't be tied up in a neat bow and I wanted to reflect on that. I think I had done a lot of pompom waving up until that point because of my real love for Jesus and my love of hearing songs that would build people's faith up. I remember back then just going, "You know, life is really messy and there's a lot of heartache." I was more interested in exploring the harder things in life.

What's the reunion tour going to look like?

Seven of the original 10 people from that tour are going back out with me to do 20 anniversary shows. So it's going to be a fun walk down memory lane for all of us because we've all gone on to other lives and other jobs. I'm excited about being back with everybody. That's what has been so amazing—people have wanted to come back and participate.

You've recorded three successful Christmas albums. What will this new project be like?

Signing with EMI, they have brought so much enthusiasm for my catalog. It was their idea to do a "best of" Christmas record and they just asked for two new songs, but I did two new songs and two old songs and they actually liked all four of them. For the other songs, I sat down one night and went through each of those three earlier Christmas records and I picked moments that were favorite moments for me. [I chose] "O Come All Ye Faithful" because it's Phil Keaggy playing guitar. I'm singing. It's really not a good performance; I'm very pitchy, but I love knowing that Phil is playing on this compilation.

What can you tell us about the new original songs?

I wrote "I Need a Silent Night" with Chris Eaton. He and I had not written together for eight years. The verses in that song talk about how crazy Christmas has become and the chorus is sort of our response to that—"It's so commercialized, but I need a silent night."

On "Baby It's Christmas," Vince was kind of messing around with those chords and it just sounded romantic. We wrote that over a cup of coffee one morning. I don't think anybody really thinks about Christmas Eve as being the most romantic time, especially if you have children, because you are exhausted. But if you could have a very romantic Christmas Eve, what would it be like?

Are you writing songs for your next studio album yet?

I've got a dozen songs that I'm ready to record and I hope to be back in the studio and get at least a few of them recorded before I do this tour. There's a song I wrote about Vince and there's a song that a friend and I wrote when she found her birth mom. "Shovel in Hand" I wrote on the airplane flying out to the [Academy of Country Music Awards] in Las Vegas. I was meeting Vince, but I had come from the cemetery watching my son and his friends bury one of their classmates. It's always songs inspired by people in my life.

Christian Music News Source

10/16: Amy Grant

The old Doris Day chestnut Sentimental Journey will not be among the tunes Amy Grant sings when she takes the stage at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix on Oct. 16. However, it perfectly sums up Grant's emotional state of mind.

Twenty years ago, the singer-songwriter released Lead Me On, a landmark album in the contemporary Christian music industry. To celebrate the anniversary, a deluxe two-disc edition recently appeared in stores.

Now, Grant has reunited with seven musicians from her 1988 touring band to revisit the material. The 20-city tour kicks off with the Phoenix concert.

"I feel like I'm going to this really cool family reunion," Grant says while driving to a business meeting in her Nashville hometown. "We literally get to go back emotionally to a younger, more innocent time. It's really energized all of us."

Surprisingly, the album that inspired the tour isn't the biggest seller in Grant's deep catalog of material. That would be Heart In Motion, her 1991 release that sold more than 5 million copies and turned the singer into a mainstream pop star. Bubbly, effervescent singles such as Baby Baby, Good for Me and Every Heartbeat dominated radio for months.

The bold Lead Me On was an altogether darker and more candid album. Rather than merely focusing on praise and worship, Grant created a disc that dealt with many of the gray areas of life and faith in such songs as Shadows and What About the Love.

The self-penned Faithless Heart is perhaps the disc's most nakedly honest tune. In the song, the narrator discusses the temptations that exist outside her marriage. "It scares me through and through / Cause I've a man at home who needs me to be true" goes the verse.

"I never, ever did that song live, but I am going to on this tour," says Grant, 47. "That one struck a little too close to the bone at the time, but I think if you're going to say something, you might as well be honest."

The honesty paid off: CCM Magazine, which covers the Christian-music industry, named the disc the top Christian album of all time. It also won honors from the Grammys and the Gospel Music Association, which gave it the Dove Award for album of the year.

"I didn't work any harder on that record than I did on any of the others," Grant says. "But the attention to detail in the production, the songs . . . it was like we were creatively fired on all pistons. It was a wonderful experience."

She hopes the experience translates to the live show. With the exception of harmonica player Terry McMillan, who died in 2007, and ex-husband Gary Chapman, she was able to regroup all the musicians from the 1988 tour.

No one hesitated before signing on. Guitarist Chris Rodriguez, who worked with Grant on two world tours, remembers he was hiking at Point Dume in Malibu when a text message arrived on his cellphone.

"I hadn't heard from Amy in ages, and out of the blue I get this message saying that she's doing a reunion tour for Lead Me On and would I be interested," he recalls. "I wrote back three words: 'Yes, yes, yes.' "

He says there is a reason people were quick to get on board.

"Amy's the best," he says. "People who work with her love her. She's generous and thoughtful, but she's not a pushover. She's the kind of person that the band will call on their day off and say, 'Hey, we're going bowling: You wanna come?' Not everyone you get to work with is like that."

Rodriguez tours with both Keith Urban and Kenny Loggins, so he has been doing what he calls "Amy homework" while on the road. In other words, listening to tapes from 1988 and relearning material he used to know by heart.

"Some things I'm very familiar with," he says. "Other things I forgot that we did a certain way. It will be interesting on certain songs to see if we stay true to the original and do it big '80s style, or if we rework them more organically."

With Grant, you imagine she'll opt for the latter. Despite the nostalgic nature of the tour, she seems like a very forward-thinking person. She signed with EMI last year and has written several songs. She plans to go into the studio in January to cut an album.

"I just left a meeting with (label president) Peter York," she says, laughing. "I played him a batch of 15 songs, and he liked four of them. You think that would be horrible, but it's not. It's great having somebody setting such a high bar. It's been a really fun, engaging experience."

Still, that's the future. Up next is a quick visit to the past.

"Going over this music, I remembered a part of myself that was gone," says Grant, who has been married to singer Vince Gill for eight years. "It's been lovely. This isn't a show for people to come to, thinking, 'Can she sing as high as she used to?' Well, I probably can't. But I do hope they are reminded of how they felt at that time in their life."

For her, the past ties into the present.

"Sometimes when you look back in a really constructive way," she says, "it can really re-ignite your fire for the future."

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