- It's about this chick I met named Amy.
(Vince laughs)
Hey everybody, it's Vince Gill.
This is my hit story from my Grammy-nominated song
"When My Amy Prays."
You know you're from Nashville
if you write a song about your wife
and she tells you the third verse
could use a little work (chuckles).
My wife is Amy Grant, fellow singer and songwriter
and as far as the record,
it's just a testament to how much I care about her.
How dear she is to me and my life.
Kindness is how she leads her life
and it's the first thing you ever notice,
it's the first thing you ever experience
and it's kind of unending.
It's one of my favorite vocals that I've ever done
in making records for now, 47 years.
You know, to lay that claim at this time in life,
it kind of gives me a little bit of encouragement
that I still have ways to get better and do things better
and sing better and play better and write better.
You know, the whole record came from a place of honesty.
I'm a really emotional guy, you know?
And people bet, when I'm singing
"Go Rest High" at some hillbilly's funeral,
so what's the over and under
and how long it takes him to cry?
The beauty in this song is the vulnerability
that I paint myself in.
And being honest enough to say,
while you may assume I'm something because of
being married to this very prominent Christian singer,
my life isn't quite like that.
To me, it's a really neat testament
to we all don't have to be the same,
so much to get along and like each other,
and so as much as I'm honoring her,
I'm also trying to be somewhat honest with myself.
The end of that first verse is probably,
to me, the most vulnerable.
To say that out loud, talk about Amy,
and when my Amy prays, that's when I see his face.
You know? I like that too.
I like most of it, as I hopefully should.
I've only written about two songs on the piano, in my life.
And this song was written on piano,
and I cannot play the piano at all.
I can just kinda barely make a few chords, and so,
I have to wait, when I'm trying to play the piano,
make sure the chord is right before I can play it,
so it's always out of time and never sounds very good,
but me banging it out on the piano
I could kind of sing along and just found my way through it.
You know, I think writing songs, as long as I have,
you also learn the value of patience.
You learn the value of not taking
the first thing you think of
as to be the greatest thing that's every been written.
You know, you have to work with it,
you have to milk it you have to see it,
you have to go, "Hey, this could be better."
I think over the years of writing so many songs,
I think I've learned to let people have those songs.
And let them put the pictures in their minds
and that's what you hope for a song,
is that someone can take it and it means something to them.
They see themselves.
This record was put out the end of '19
and then a couple months later the pandemic hit
and the whole world was shut down.
And to be quite honest, I was very surprised
it got nominated for a Grammy, you know?
It was not a hit song, you know?
But if you really understand
and study the history of the Grammy's,
they're not always nominating
what the biggest records were
and who the biggest stars were.
They go and they find,
once again they find things they like.
It just feels great no matter where you are,
if you're at the start of your career,
the height of your career
or towards the latter years of your career,
you just wanna be heard.