Pop Music Review : Amy Grant--Heir to King, Cousin to the Boss

His fans probably wouldn’t appreciate the comparison, and some of hers might not either. But, in concert, Amy Grant has a knack for achieving a kind of illusory intimacy in an impersonal arena through shared-nostalgic story-weaving that nearly makes her a spiritual (no pun intended) cousin to Bruce Springsteen and his famous growin’-up raps.

When this erstwhile gospel singer preaches between songs now, she’s usually testifying to the power of popular music, waxing wistful about the sanctifying qualities of a transistor radio planted under the pillow late at night and a single earphone lodged in a waxy orifice.

There, of course, the Springsteen correlation ends, since the music this boomer was absorbing through that transistor in her Wonder Years was admittedly more white-bread--Carole King, not King Curtis.

Playing to a sold-out house Saturday at The Pond of Anaheim, Grant used her lengthiest reminiscing on vinyl and AM radio as preface to a letter-perfect cover of “It’s Too Late,” which she recently recorded for an all-star “Tapestry” remake due out this year.

The good news is that Grant has taken middle-of-the-road influences (Karen Carpenter also comes to mind) that might spell death for artistic growth and forged an identity that transcends blandness.

Her latest album may have been egregiously overproduced, but at The Pond, Grant was her irrepressible self: a rare combination of utterly casual and completely in command; soothingly sensual in all sorts of bedside manner, making--for two hours, anyway--sex wholesome and God sexy.

Grant’s recent dance-pop has been on the mid-tempo side, allowing this show’s mix of bubble gum and balladry to feel more relaxed than some tours past. The easy mannerisms of Grant and her backup singers graduated to actual choreography only near the end with the mock-Supremes moves of “Every Heartbeat.”

The only serious clunker in an otherwise smartly paced and arranged show: “Hats,” a rhythmically chirpy “working mom” tribute that was and still is way off the edge of the cuteness scale (filling the token-novelty slot that “Fat Little Baby” had in her tours 10 years ago).

The problem, meanwhile, of how to integrate the old, pre-secular material has been solved--by segregating it in a well-calculated “unplugged” interlude. The dated “Wise Up,” for example, has been re-imagined as a pop-blues complete with acoustic slide. And Grant gets to evoke more nostalgia still in this segment by picking up an acoustic guitar and recalling her days as a 16-year-old church-circuit soloist singing “Mountaintop.” She’s come a long way, baby, baby.

Gary Chapman opened the show with plenty of dry quips about the humility of warming up for one’s infinitely more famous superstar spouse. His material--as evidenced by the new title “Written in the Scars”--tends more toward the overtly religious than his wife’s current repertoire, a fact of which he was wryly self-conscious: “If you happened to hear ‘Baby Baby’ on the radio and just stumbled in, rest easy--we are not taking up an offering at any point tonight.”

Chapman’s brand of light Americana rock has little enough competition within the contemporary Christian world that it may come off as gritty therein, though it’s old-school enough in the pop mainstream that it can only be--and has been--marketed as country.

The crowd lapped it up--especially the closing quasi-barrelhouse version of the hymn “Gospel Ship”--but his unashamedly devotional tunes deserve a more distinctive treatment: If Chapman brought the appealing smarts and wit demonstrated in his self-deprecating moments to placing some stylistic edges around the earnestness of his writing, he might have something.

(Curiously, the concert was picketed--not by Danzig fans, but by about a dozen anti-abortion activists calling on Grant to “repent” for affiliating with a retail chain that has made a corporate contribution to Planned Parenthood. For the record, Grant is aware of the small groundswell of protest, and is standing by her sponsor.)