Pop Music Reviews : With Amy Grant, It’s Still Intimate

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 illusory intimacy in an impersonal arena that nearly makes her a spiritual 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.

There the Springsteen correlation ends, of course, since the pop that this boomer absorbed in her Wonder Years was more white-bread--Carole King, not King Curtis. On Saturday at the Pond of Anaheim, Grant most lengthily reminisced on vinyl and AM as preface to a letter-perfect version of King’s “It’s Too Late,” which she just recorded for an all-star “Tapestry” remake due this year.

The good news is that Grant has taken middle-of-the-road influences that might spell death for anyone else’s growth and forged from these an identity that transcends blandness. Her latest album may have been overproduced, but at the Pond, Grant was her usual combination of utterly casual and in command, soothingly sensual in all sorts of bedside manner, for two hours making sex wholesome and God sexy.

Grant’s recent dance-pop has been on the mid-tempo side, allowing this tour’s mix of bubble-gum and earnest balladry to feel more relaxed, with the easy mannerisms of Grant and backup singers graduating to choreography only near the end with the mock-Supremes moves of “Every Heartbeat.”

The problem of how to integrate the pre-secular material has been solved by segregating it, in an “unplugged” segment--with the dated “Wise Up,” for example, reimagined as a pop-blues.