No getting over you: On Amy Grant’s ‘Heart in Motion’

“Just keeping up with Myrrh recording artist Amy Grant these days is a full-time job,” Bob Darden noted in an April 1986 column for Billboard. Plowing through the Christian star’s impressive crossover attempts in the last calendar year, he saw no reason to subdue his expectations — and this was several months before Grant would join Peter Cetera on the #1 “The Next Time I Fall in Love.” Before this slush came “Find a Way,” which had peaked at #29 the previous summer. Other than cool chord changes and an ingratiating chug, “Find a Way” doesn’t sound much different from, say, Rick Springfield’s “State of the Heart” and Bryan Adams’ “Heaven,” its chart bookends.

What does sound different is Grant’s burr, manipulated as dexterously as Chrissie Hynde’s: it suggested sex, it didn’t stink of sex. The faith community knew it, rest assured. They found in Grant an avatar of formidable perk, a spokesperson without cant, and a devotee in Jesus for whom Falwellian bluster was as antithetical to her public posture as Marcel Proust was to Ronald Reagan. She was human, all right, but she gleamed: it was as if she had gotten the requisite cancer-free exposure to sunlight.

So Grant, no stranger to platinum albums, wanted more. Teaming up with Michael Omartian, a producer-songwriter-keyboardist best known for Donna Summer’s She Works Hard for the Money, Grant recorded an album even more of-its-moment than 1985’s Unguarded. It worked. Replete with swooping synthesized crescendos, courteous El Lay guitar solos, and drum machines that had never known Sunday mornings, Heart in Motion competed against Mariah Carey and Wilson Phillips without threatening to eclipse them; it quietly and courteously turned into one of 1991’s blockbusters, the year’s 15th best-selling album (and five times platinum), home of five top 20 singles. Call it the Christian rock Thriller.

An equal opportunity musical lech as a high schooler, I bought Heart in Motion and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Superstition on the same July record store visit. The goth queen and the Christian ambassador had plenty in common: they reveled in pomp, wrote about faith in as conventionally weird a way as a grandmother chugging a Heineken, and were cold-eyed about selling records beyond their bases (industry wags noticed how two record labels represented her; she had her secular and religious audiences sorted). Alas, the Banshees’ album faded after I realized “Kiss Them For Me” would earn airplay well into the fall. I preferred Heart in Motion. None of the critics got it. Exception: Chuck Eddy, who might’ve been persuaded to include Heart in Motion among his best metal albums if he’d had me yelling in his ear back then. “This is top-level radio pop for flight attendants and office assistants, unconventionally produced, emoted in husky shouts and whispers that glow like a burning bush,” he wrote in Entertainment Weekly.

Just so. The grain in Grant’s voice makes these zippy examples of prime Poppy Bush Interzone-era pop devotional in any context, but she and Omartian and collaborators like Michael W. Smith, Wayne Kirkpatrick, and Chris Eaton read each other as well as a longtime Bible study group. “Baby Baby” hit #1 because its carousel arrangement goes up-down-turn-around-please-don’t-let-me-hit-the-ground. “That’s What Love is For” survives its triteness because Grant adds pebbly grit to a line like “Talk us down from the ledges” until it sounds in this context rather startling. She and Eaton offered a deeply weird song called “Hats” keyed to Chic-indebted rhythm riffs, obtrusive backing vocalists blowing raspberries, and the kind of horn section that Gloria Estefan was once not good enough for. Its delightful lyrics depict a woman trapped on the seesaw of mom and career woman. Flight attendants and office assistants got it. The bullfrog croak of “Every Heartbeat”‘s keyboard bass, the album’s sturdiest hook, complements lines like “I’m simple but I’m no fool.”

She offered these trinkets to her newly swollen pop audience; a trio of songs she addressed to her Christian one. Growling through the self-written “Hope Set High,” projecting a welcome self-righteousness on “Ask Me” (“…if I know that there’s a god in the heavens!”), nursery-rhyming a way too dumb history lesson about Galileo, Grant puts a near-decade’s worth of craft to use. These songs own their gloss; the tension between Grant’s delivery and the glint of these electronic ice palaces, as in Rosanne Cash’s period work, is essential.

As if she had proved a point Grant edged away from her success, returning to her roots after House of Love (1994). She shocked many of her fans when she left hubby Gary Chapman for Vince Gill. Turn on terrestrial adult contemporary radio and “Baby Baby” has a home (nobody gave “The Next Time I Fall in Love” the boot, though). And Heart in Motion remains a model of 1980s-hangover popcraft. Cast aside biases against Grant’s origins and its hitbound decisions and Heart in Motion is as convincing a case for the uneasy necessary co-existence of spiritual and temporal forces in the pop album as any early ’70s Al Green. Give me a chance and I’ll introduce it to this generation of flight attendants and office managers.