I went to school with this kid named Randy whose motto was to do things out of the ordinary, just for the fun of it. Whether it be signing up as stage hands for the high school play, having picnics in the middle of a basketball court in the middle of the night, or checking out some hole-in-the-wall restaurant, he’d always interest us with some new zany thing to do. I remember going to my first outdoor concert with him and also seeing my first Jazz combo in some seedy bar downtown with him “just because it’s something new and interesting to do”.
One day I was walking up to the 7-Eleven, and I saw a flyer posted up near the Music store and Guitar lesson building stating: Performing Live at (so-and-so pavilion), Christian Music sensation AMY GRANT! I looked at the picture of this girl. I hadn’t heard of her before, but looking at the picture of Amy dressed in a leopard print flecked jacket, she looked intriguing, to say the least (and boy, was she pretty!)
Then I remembered that Randy had said one of his music colleagues had let him borrow some contemporary Christian cassettes before, and he thought they were pretty good! I knew he’d be up to exploring a new kind of music!
The next day at school, I met up with Randy and excitedly told him,“Hey, there’s this cute Contemporary Christian singer named Amy Grant who’s coming to perform at some event, you wanna go check it out? I think it’d be interesting to go to a concert like that!” Randy looked at me for a few seconds before slowly replying, “Naw.”
I was a bit surprised by this answer. He usually was an inquisitive kind of guy, especially where exploring new music comes in. “You sure?”, I said. “You said you worked with some students who played you some Christian music in your Musician Workshop, remember? You said you liked it, and besides, I think a concert like this’ll be fun!”
Randy pondered for a moment before dismissively saying “Nah, I’ll pass…You can go.”
I was bummed out! I really wanted to check out this girl, but not by myself! This was something that I was sure he would find interesting, but I guess Christian music just wasn’t as “cool” as seeing a Jazz combo performing at a dive near the airport. “Oh well, sorry, Amy!” was all I could think. I honestly didn’t think I’d hear anything more about her again.
Fast forward about three years later, and I’m long out of High school ,and am working at a Photofinishing Lab in charge of the Machine-prints department. The “E6” room was where all the negatives and slides were processed, and so I spent most of my time in there loading film and mounting slides. The supervisor of the “E6” room was a guy named Joe who was also a pastor of a small church on the weekends, and since he was running the processing room, the radio was tuned to what HE wanted to listen to, in this case, KAIM, Hawaii’s only (at the time) Christian broadcasting channel. The three or four of us who had to do most of our work in that room got to know a lot of the contemporary christian scene after a while!
The very first week I started working in the E6 room, I heard this beautiful song on the radio called “Mountain Top”. When the song was over, the DJ informed me that the singer was none other than Amy Grant!
“Hey!” I said to myself, “That’s the girl that came in concert when I was in high school!” She sounded just like what I imagined her to sound like, thoughtful and breezy, just her gentle voice and her acoustic guitar. KAIM played that song with so much regularity, that I thought it must be her new single, but my supervisor told me it was an older song of hers.
In any case, I fell in love with Mountain Top, and one weekend, I made my way to Rhema Bookstore on Kapiolani Boulevard, where they had a really great selection of Christian CDs and tapes, to see if they had the album with that song on it. I was in luck, for not only did they have the release, they had it on CD! (Back then, most of the Christian music offered was only on cassette!) I found out that not only was Mountain Top an “older” song of hers, it was on her very FIRST self-titled album released way back in 1977! I immediately bought it!
Upon listening to AMY GRANT for the first time, I was immediately taken by the opening song “Beautiful Music”. It was so sweet and simple, and I just loved the sincerity in her voice. Then on came Mountain Top, and before I knew it, I had come to the last song on the album, a happy little ditty called “He Gave me A New Song”, which ended leaving the listener in a really good mood!
Now, I think I have to point out that I’m not anything NEAR a devout Christian- I went to church when I was a kid, but that was IT. The reason I liked the Amy Grant‘s music was simply because I loved them as great songs, religious or not! Oh, and of course, I thought she was cute as heck!
As I got to know Amy’s voice, I started to realize just how important she was in the current Christian music scene- there were so many great songs of hers that were in regular rotation on KAIM, songs like “Angels”, ”Everywhere I Go” and the great “Faithless Heart”, that I knew I had to explore more of Amy’s catalog!
On my next trip to Rhema, browsing through the Amy Grant stuff they had, I came across a CD that took me aback, for there on the cover was a picture of Amy in the same leopard print flecked jacket that I’d seen years before on the concert flyer! In fact, It was from the same B&W photo shoot! I picked it up, and there on the back was the exact picture that I’d seen! I held up the album, thinking “Say!! This must have been the CD she was touring for when she came to Hawaii!” The album was called Unguarded, and sure enough, when I looked at the date of the Album, it was 1985, the same year I was in school! That was all I needed to know, and I bought the CD without a second thought!
How exciting to listen to the album that had come out the same time that I was introduced to her for the first time!
I’m not sure what I was expecting when I put in Unguarded for the first time, maybe since it was an older album I was expecting more acoustic guitar or something, but nothing could prepare me for the synthesizer driven rocking opening track called “Love Of Another Kind”! Poppy and catchy, this was a far cry from the acoustic “Mountain Top”, but I loved it immediately!
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the next song “Find A Way” had gotten moderate airtime on “regular” Top 40 radio channels, and there was even a really cool video of Amy singing this song dressed in that very same leopard-print jacket sported on the album cover!
Then the song I had become quite familiar with from KAIM airplay, “Everywhere I Go”, followed by the country-pop song ”I Love You” and the very modern new-wavey songs “Stepping In Your Shoes” and “Fight”, which featured some great bass playing!
Winding down the home stretch, we now come upon the rockin’ song “Wise Up” co written by Michael W. Smith , he of “Friends” fame, and speaking of that song, the next song is a tune very similar in vein…
The awesome song “Sharayah”, the song that I consider to be the “album closer” song of Unguarded, (as The Prodigal which is the actual closer seems more like an epilogue, at least for me!)
The song is about someone’s fervent hope that their friend will turn to Jesus because they want to spend eternity with them, kind of like Michael W. Smith’s "Friends" song.
One day I was browsing through a record store and noticed that the cover on the LP had a different pose of Amy than the CD I had at home! I thought at the time maybe the CD and the Album had different images, and quickly picked up the album, but I was later to find out that there were in actuality FOUR different covers, and through the wonder of ebay, over time I was able to collect them all!
Amy also released a wonderful video companion to the Unguarded release, offering up the aforementioned video for the song “Find A Way”, as well as videos for the songs “Angels”, “Wise Up”, and “Don’t Run Away” !
As time has gone on, I’ve managed to get every major release from Amy’s back-catalog on CD, and continue to support her to this day! From My Father's Eyes, through Age To Age and Lead Me On, Amy's constantly evolving over the years, but it’s always been a welcome growth, and I've loved every facet of her career. In fact, one of her more recent albums “Behind The Eyes” is one of my all time favorite albums from her, just when I thought she couldn't get any better!
