From the Inside Out

Amy Grant is Christian music’s most celebrated and commercially successful artist, the first to achieve platinum status (with 1983’s “Age to Age” album) and the first to break the 5 million mark (with 1991’s “Heart in Motion”).

Not yet 37, Grant has sold 20 million albums, won five Grammys and 26 Dove awards, topped the pop charts (with the ebullient “Baby Baby”), had three kids, sustained a 15-year marriage with fellow Christian-country artist Gary Chapman (host of the Nashville Network’s “Prime Time Country”) and instituted a Nashville Christmas concert tradition that, for the first time this year, takes to the road.

Given all that, Grant was somewhat surprised three years ago when several people--both close friends and professional associates--told her they felt her music was not a full reflection of the person they knew and challenged her to explore her interior life, to go below the surface.

“I thought, especially on the heels of two pretty slick pop records, it was fair criticism,” Grant says. “It wasn’t like they were saying, ‘What have you done for the last 14 records?’ I think that people who knew me . . . felt it would do me good personally to dig around on the inside a little bit.”

The result of what Grant has called “a complete self-examination from head to toe” is “Behind the Eyes,” an album that moves away from the glossy pop sound of “Heart in Motion” and “House of Love” into uncluttered, mostly acoustic folk-rock constructs and somber texts. The album sits comfortably beside those by such singer-songwriters as Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow and Shawn Colvin. On it, Grant meditates on the loss of innocence, self-doubt, disappointment, darker adult emotions and introspective themes not generally associated with her past work.

“I love to sing ‘Baby Baby’ and I love pop music,” Grant says. “I love Hanson--I turn on the radio and my son, he’s 10, rolls his eyes and goes, ‘Oh, them again?’ But you know what? I’ve got a need for that kind of music--pristine, fun, pop music. [Making that kind of music] wasn’t the most natural thing to me, but I was glad for the stretch.

“I think my natural tendency is a little more toward a folk sound.”

Indeed, with her wavy, sandy-brown hair piled in a bun, jeans, leather jacket and acoustic guitar case, Grant looked more folk minstrel than pop star when she flew in last month for a solo performance at the Capital Women’s Show in Fairfax County, Va.

“I am a somewhat unkempt person and earthy, always have been,” she says with a laugh, having just finished a quick sound check for a Joni Mitchell song.

Growing up, Grant points out, her greatest influences were Mitchell, James Taylor, Carole King, Dan Fogelberg. Which explains why almost all of the songs on her new album are sung in the first person, even when they are the result of collaborations, including with longtime songwriting partners Wayne Kirkpatrick and Tommy Sims (the latter a coauthor, with Gordon Kennedy, of Eric Clapton’s Grammy-winning “Change the World”).

Grant and Kirkpatrick have written together for more than a decade, a partnership that begat friendship. “Seeing me at close range, Wayne started making some observations about me as a person, about the impact of a very public life, about some patterns in my life that I took for granted,” Grant says, noting that she’s been in the public eye since age 16.

The constant pressures of others’ expectations and the stylistic and moral straitjackets of the genre weighed on Grant. After all, she is one of contemporary Christian music’s most visible figures, one who was criticized for making albums that crossed over to the secular side.

“There were times that it brought me to tears,” Grant says, adding that she never felt she was being used “to work out somebody else’s agenda. I always have been given freedom by Myrrh and A & M [which simultaneously release her albums in the Christian and pop markets] to follow whatever muse was in me.

“I think it’s a very common experience for a woman in her mid-30s to back away and say, ‘I want to step back far enough from what I think is normal and value my life for what it is, reassess the investments that I’ve made, seek what’s really good and what is really propped up.’ ”

More so than her two pop-oriented albums, what’s noticeable about “Behind the Eyes” is an absence of overt references to God or Jesus, though Grant’s faith clearly informs the writing. That may lead to further criticism in the Christian market, but Grant feels confident in her approach.

“The big hurdle I’ve finally gotten over is--in a very healthy way--that it doesn’t matter to me anymore,” she says of past pressures as the quintessential Christian girl-next-door-to-a-church.

“It matters to me what I think, it matters to me what the people I have invested in think. That freedom from other people’s expectations allows me to choose when and where to be vulnerable, to not be part of somebody else’s agenda.”