Amy Grant: Hint of Shadow for a Christian Singer : Gospel/Pop Star Isn’t All Spiritual Happy Talk, and Neither Is Her Latest Album

NASHVILLE — Gospel-cum-pop singer Amy Grant remembers being on tour a few years ago when a new Joni Mitchell album, “Dog Eat Dog,” came out. She and several members of her band who counted themselves Mitchell fans eagerly gathered in the back of their bus, Xeroxes of the cassette’s lyric sheet in hand, to have a listening party.

Spirits were high until the last song on Side 1 came on. It was “Tax Free,” a rant against the televised version of Christianity, with actor Rod Steiger interjecting a nasty spoken-word caricature of such a TV evangelist between Mitchell’s vitriolic verses.

Grant, who is probably contemporary Christendom’s most famous and outspoken musical emissary, fell into a funk.

“That song came on and we looked at each other and murmured, ‘Oh, gosh.’ Christianity has just been so maligned. And it wasn’t ‘poor God’ or ‘poor Jesus,’ because they’re still who they are, but just ‘oh, what a gross misrepresentation we’ve made.’ And that was before any of the big stuff had come down.

“Let me say that the back half of ’86 and all of ’87 were a great time to be off the road,” added Grant, who’s now back on it with an 18-month tour that reaches the Pacific Amphitheatre on Saturday. “It was a great time to not be in the public eye as a Christian because of the news-flash things going on. I don’t say that judgmentally at all; I was just so glad to be here on the farm, out of the picture and not having to tell everybody what I thought.

“People have the most warped perception of Christianity. I mean, nobody on the street is talking about C.S. Lewis. Nobody is talking about Oswald Chambers or Charles Spurgeon or people who are cornerstones of the faith and have been for years. Everybody’s talking about people whose pendulums have swung way wide as being the representatives for the family of God and followers of Christ. I think the silent mass of people who are swept up in the passion of God’s existence and his effect on their life have no voice. They speak with their lives, and they look at all this media stuff coming down and they’re just grossed out and sick at heart.”

Grant even began to question her own culpability in the mass-media gross-out.

“And here I am, going, ‘Gee, I’m part of the Christians in media!’ And I just want to be normal and real, and I want to live the same life that I would’ve lived if nobody ever bought a record or heard me on the radio or saw me on a talk show--and hope that by God’s grace something of his integrity will be maintained. But that’s his doing. I just think that any time a human is involved, you’re talking major screw-up. And that’s the Catch-22 with God living in humans.”

She laughs a hearty Southern laugh that cuts across the expanse of her Nashville farmhouse’s living room. “That’s a big rub.”

Balancing the very public excesses and extremes of the world’s Jim Bakkers and Jimmy Swaggarts--and the ugly reflections held up by the world’s Joni Mitchells--would be a tall order for any of Grant’s aforementioned pillars of faith, let alone a doubt-wracked 28-year-old woman who admits her genteel Tennessee upbringing was privileged and sheltered.

Yet Grant remains determined to see her music cut across the boundaries that increasingly separate the conservative evangelical from the patron of the secular arts.

She grew up in the ‘70s with Carole King as a heroine, and after Grant’s very successful flirtation with sequencer-driven dance-pop on her platinum 1985 album “Unguarded,” she’s now returned to those mellower, more contemplative roots. Her latest effort, “Lead Me On,” is an impressive bid to create a quasi-religious, quasi-romantic “Tapestry” for the late ‘80s. Her understated pipes lighting a quiet fire that’s soothing and sexy, Grant beckons forth in both love songs and gospel songs with the oddly sensual aura of hearth, home and altar.

Hints of social, spiritual and romantic unrest do creep into the otherwise soothing tonics: “Faithless Heart” deals outrightly with adulterous temptations, Janis Ian’s “What About the Love” takes on both unctuous fundamentalism and Wall Street materialism, and “Wait for the Healing” suggests that things may get worse before they get better for 1988’s shell- and scandal-shocked Christians.

“There is kind of a dark side to this album,” says Grant, who admits she survived minor marriage difficulties and spiritual dehydration between the last album and this one. She nonetheless feels confident that her older, more conservative fans will be bothered by the new-found questions and confessions only “if they want me to be a Barbie doll.”

This is in stark contrast to her decade-long string of albums for gospel’s Myrrh label, which were full of spiritual happy talk. “I thought she was taking the easy route all along,” said A&M; Records executive David Anderle, who served as executive producer on the latest album and encouraged her to take more risks. “I thought a lot of what she was doing had been very fluffy, very cute, very pretty. . . . “

No more. “This is a really good record, one you don’t take to the public saying ‘This is a Christian record,’ ” Anderle says. “You go to the public and say, ‘This is a real record.’ And if people fall in love with the song and find out afterward that Amy is a Christian, they’re not gonna run away. They’re not gonna say, ‘Oh God, I made a mistake. I really liked the song, but I don’t like it now because I’m not a Christian.’ ”

Still, won’t some never get past the image of Amy Grant--Christian Singer?

“Probably, and that’s a shame,” says Anderle. “I can’t tell Amy not to say Jesus and can’t tell Amy not to say Him with a capital H, because that’s all part of her love, too. She has a human love and she has a spiritual love. We all do; she just chooses to have her spiritual love revolve around her God and around Jesus. That’s not the way I want to go, for instance; I have my own God and my own spirituality. But I don’t have a hard time with that (Grant’s Christian views) at all.”

Anderle is the rare record executive who speaks in terms of good and evil . “With so much decadence and weirdness going on in the world, it’s almost lining up right now--which side do you belong on? It sounds so corny, but she’s a spokesman for that which is good. She represents a certain way to live which really is dealing with ethics, morals.

“But at the same time, she’s not pure. She has been tempted, like everybody. She’s not Pollyanna, not Goody Two-Shoes. When people listen to the record, they’re going to see that she’s a grown woman.”

Might not she still seem just a little too wholesome for the average weekend-warrior pop record-buyer, though?

Anderle chuckles. “I think it’s OK to lust after Amy if you want to.”

Dan Harrell, a brother-in-law of Grant’s who oversees her career with partner Mike Blanton, recalls a minor revelation he and the Nashville management team had:

“We went to a Twisted Sister concert a few years back,” says Harrell, “and we came out going, ‘You know what? Everybody--whether they believe it or not--is basically preaching something.’ Because everybody’s got something that’s down inside of them that’s coming out in their lyrics and their music. Everybody, if they’re really good at what they do, is preaching something. We all of a sudden decided we’re not gonna be defensive about the fact that Amy Grant’s gonna try to the best of her ability to express what’s in her heart. Twisted Sister was doing a great job of it that night; it’s the same thing for us.”

Still, Grant herself has stronger compunctions all the time about burdening her audience with the full weight of her beliefs:

“I love orchestrating things. The good side of it is that I can move a crowd that’s much bigger than one I can fit around my dining room table--hopefully 10,000 people--and be a hostess and make them feel that we’re in a living room. And the bad side is that sometimes I don’t recognize that God does not need me to orchestrate his plan. You know, I’m so busy trying to manipulate people toward God, and I think that in the last couple of years--and maybe it’s reflected in ‘Lead Me On’--it’s like ‘OK, You be God, and I’m gonna be Amy.’

“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that it’s my job to pray for people, but it’s God’s job to save them. And I think there’s a time when I felt more pressure, not from inside of me, but from other people to be pushy with my beliefs. And then after a while, I thought, I’m just gonna have to do what my heart says, because as soon as I start trying to read somebody else’s monologue, I’m on such unfamiliar turf that I really get lost.

“And by pressure, I mean, I remember being on a talk show and getting several letters afterward saying, ‘You had 8 1/2 minutes on that talk show and you didn’t give the gospel! A million-and-a-half people could’ve heard it!’ And I remember thinking, ‘You know, you could’ve set up a PA at the grocery store and told 150 people yourself!’

“I think some people would relate to my honesty about my understanding of God, and on their own want to find out who he is. I don’t think very many people relate to being banged on the head with the Bible or being told what to do all the time. I wish I hadn’t been quite so. . . . Even in sort of a gentle, young woman way, I think I was pushier in the past than I am now.”

She pauses, reflecting on the age-old dogma-versus-mysticism dilemma. “I’m sitting here just smiling, because the older I get and the longer that I follow Christ, I realize that he is so capable of revealing himself to anybody. And he’s so much bigger than anything I could explain, it almost makes me hesitate more now to try and explain him in a song: ‘You are so big and incredible, and you chose me, and you’re so beyond all of this--and I think I just diminished you by trying to explain you to people’.”