[Music]
>>Narration: The music video, Find a Way, may be a bit too tame for MTV but the song is getting
plenty of airplay on top 40 radio. Astounding when you consider that its performer Amy Grant is a
gospel singer and she's performed a near miracle bridging the gap between Christian music and pop
Amy's concerts feature a seven-piece rock and roll band,
three backup singers, and high-tech sound and lighting effects,
not at all what you'd expect from a gospel singer, but then Amy, with her good looks
and leather pants, is anything but traditional. Some think of her as the Madonna of gospel rock.
She's received three Grammy awards and holds the distinction of recording the first solo
gospel album, Age to Age, ever to go gold, all this in a career that's barely seven years old.
>>Q: Would you prefer to sing to an audience of those who are already kindred in spirit with you,
already converted, or would you rather sing to to non-believers and agnostics?
>>Amy Grant: I like both. I really do. There's something real refreshing about going into a group
that's just wild and crazy because I think, what have I got to lose, I'm totally myself and they can
take me or leave me and I felt that way the first time I walked out on stage to do the Volunteer Jam
the Charlie Daniels Volunteer Jam in Tennessee. I'm sitting backstage going
are you an idiot? You're getting ready to go out and do 20 minutes of songs about Jesus. What about
you know and then I walk out there and they go here comes the gospel singer and you know
I remember going to fraternity parties and just want to have a good time, have a date, have fun
little hug, little kiss, and I walk up, aren't you the one that sings gospel music? And all the guys
walk away and you're, wait a minute just a second I'm a person yeah and you know and I think oh gee
it's another fraternity party except for there are fifteen thousand people here
and you know and they're going to introduce me as though I'm something and instead
of a person and I walked out you know people kind of mockingly hallelujah
but that makes me laugh because you know I know the stereotypes too.
>>Narration: Amy's still hearing those hallelujahs but not at frat parties anymore.
Now they're cheering her at Radio City Music Hall, a long way from the churches and colleges
of the south and midwest where she grew up never intending to be a gospel star.
>>Amy Grant: I started right when I was 15 and wrote about my life
wrote about my dog my grandmother my this and my that and
as I grew up being your normal kid never sang in a choir people because
I would talk about Jesus frequently in songs, not every song but a lot, they said gospel singer
and I think what's happening now is that people are saying you know what, Amy's a person.
She's normal and and uh and she loves Jesus and some people go great and some people say gross
and some people embrace it and some people don't.
>>Narration: Life is good for Amy. She travels extensively with her husband, fellow musician
Gary Chapman, but still manages to find the time for the simple things in life.
Amy's driven, but not just by the idea of selling records and achieving success.
>>I have experienced some wonderful things in this life
and I want I really want to have the opportunity to communicate that.
>>A lot of people who are caught up in the in the horns of ambition will do almost anything
to to get there, to succeed.
>>Well I feel like um what I have to offer, it comes from in here. It doesn't come from
an executive decision or a new poster layout or a new you know sales strategy and hopefully the
things I write about in my song whether they're heavy spiritual or whether it's describing the
colors in the sunrise that morning hopefully those are going to transcend a 24 year old face and
hopefully an emotion or a thought that one of my songs could bring to somebody is still going
to be effective when I'm dead or an old bag of bones rocking on the front porch of my farm.
>>Narration: Maybe this 24- year-old face has found a way
not by trying desperately to cross over to the pop mainstream
but by making just enough adjustment to make the pop mainstream cross over to her.
[Music]