Amy Grant - Greatest Hits

I know there's a pretty strong underground Amy Grant following on ilx. My boss likes her too. He was planning his 40th birthday party a few months ago and part of the plan was originally going to be to include music from 1973, but he "took a look and couldn't find any good music from that year." I wanted to counter him, all like "Are you kidding me? Raw Power! Houses of the Holy! Space Ritual!" But then I realized that the things I like best about 1973 may not appeal to your average Amy Grant fan. So it's too late for the party, but I picked up this comp and plan to listen to it over the next couple of days to try and get a working understanding of this musician. Bonus points for naming music from '73 that would resonate.

Heart in Motion is one of my favorite albums of the early nineties. A friend who was contemptuous of chart pop would weep whenever he heard "I Will Remember You."

Every Heartbeat is sheer perfection.

I have a lot of time for That's What Love Is For too. Along with Baby Baby (obviously), you have a run of singles as strong as any from that era IMO

impossible to choose between "every heartbeat," "i will remember you," and "saved by love"

"Every Heartbeat" has one of my favorite on-the-nose pop lyrics: "I'm simple but I'm no fool."

And that wobbly synth bass.

impossible to choose between "every heartbeat," "i will remember you," and "saved by love"

― emo canon in twee major (BradNelson), Tuesday, September 24, 2013 9:27 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, that's a tough choice, with "Lead Me On," "Thy Word" and "In A Little WHile" in the very next tier.

Love Amy Grant. Agree with above, this will be between "Every Heartbeat" and "Saved By Love". My actual favorite Amy, though, is "Breath of Heaven".

How is "Breath of Heaven" not on this comp?

this is a pretty weird Greatest Hits - no "Sing Your Praise To the Lord"? "Simple Things" gets the nod from Simple Things instead of "Beautiful" or "Out in the Open"? wasn't there a video for "Galileo"? Anyway, ranked:

Lead Me On
Angels
Thy Word
Every Heartbeat
Father's Eyes
El Shaddai
I Will Remember You
Baby Baby
Lucky One
Stay For Awhile

and then the rest but that's the top ten ordered imo

It's been nineteen years and I still got the synth riff from "Lucky One" in my head.

wait Saved By Love belongs in there, oversight...probably better than "El Shaddai" so put it in there and knock "Stay for Awhile" off

OK guys, I'm gonna listen to Amy Grant's Greatest Hits.

Amy Grant, "Heart in Motion" - C/D?

the heart in motion music video trilogy imo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PddJStucKQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMXuuYnoRdI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcYIZ-cduvM

YOU LIKE TO DRIVE LIKE AEROSMITH AND GR8080

i wish "good for me" were on this greatest hits, i'd probably vote for it

as it is, yeah it's "saved by love"

good for me is on it, it is the 8th poll option

I love how she was addicted to massive tacky synth riffs into the mid nineties.

good for me is on it, it is the 8th poll option

lol hilarious, my eyes totally glazed over it. too many three word titles

"I Will Remember You" hits my weepy spot for some reason. so...that one

I went into this honestly hoping to come out of it an Amy Grant convert, but I dunno, a lot of these just sound a bit too bland and restrained to be good pop. Like, if there was an adult-leaning commercial pop axis that ran from Belinda Carlisle on one side and Celine Dion on the other, Grant is somewhere in the middle, but that's still a little too close to the latter for my liking. The "Baby Baby" --> "I Will Remember You" sequence are the ones I remember, and I will admit to getting a tiny nostalgic kick out of hearing them again. "Baby Baby," in particular, is pretty much what I remember the very early 90s sounding like; an argument could be made for the song as representative of the very last time that the charts sounded so irony-free, before hip hop and grunge rendered pop eternally hard-edged and cynical (consider that even by 1994, a movie soundtrack ballad like Elton's "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" was sharing chart space with something like Beck's "Loser"). Not really sure how to vote.

"saved by love"

man you guys I like saved by love too but over thy word and angels? and lead me on? lead me on is a f'in' masterpiece imo

wait how is contemporary pop hard-edged and cynical?

Amy Grant should get an Eagles-style thread IMO

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

xxpost

I'm generalizing horribly, of course, but I hear no contemporary counterpart to "Baby Baby" among anything current. "Call Me Maybe," I suppose, but the larger trend is more towards infusing everything with themes of empowerment, self-sufficiency, competitiveness and hedonism. Not that these things weren't always around, of course (and I'm not really criticizing, but merely observing), but in pop I don't get the feeling that the frothy innocence of something like "Baby Baby" would fly today. Or if it would, then not for long--note how quickly even teen-pop artists feel the need to make their "adult" transition. Rihanna and Britney could not get away with something like this.

I'm sure that anyone here could bombard me with counter-examples to this claim, but as long as I am (again) horribly generalizing, it makes sense to me to condense the general sentiment of pop circa 1991 as "I'm taken with the notion to love you with the sweetest of devotion," and pop circa 2013 as "work bitch!"

you're eliding a looooong decade though (Blige, Carey, Boys II Men, Brandy, not to mention Madonna, Janet, etc).

Yes. Again, horribly generalizing (so maybe I should just stop?). I'm sure if I had more time to build an argument I could include all of those artists in an analysis of how it was that Madonna, Mary J, etc got us from "Baby Baby" to our current place.

I don't think "Baby Baby" stands in well for its era. Grant is a unique artist - the only CCM artist to successfully cross over, I think? - and words like "devotion" do extra work in a song by her. it was well known to her fans at the time that the song isn't a romantic song, either, but a song for her newborn, who was six weeks old when the song was recorded.

these songs all take me back to when I was 10 or 11. not a bad thing at all. "Every Heartbeat" is a hooky, catchy song as well.

xpost

Grant's circumstances are certainly unique, but "Baby Baby" was still the kind of song that could easily have been a hit in its era.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Classic case of boy meets girl