25 Albums I Can't Live Without: #17

Amy Grant, "Age to Age"

I’ve said plenty of times before that I grew up on the Christian music of the ‘80s. It was a heady time when the genre expanded in so many ways, and leading the forefront of this growth was Amy Grant.

Grant was a veteran in the industry by the time “Age to Age” came out. Her self-titled album came out when she was only 16, and “Age to Age” was her sixth album — including two live albums.

You could tell that her record label wanted to raise the stakes. Michael W. Smith and Kathy Troccoli came in to write, play, and sing, and this album helped launch both of their careers. Brown Bannister’s production sounds crisper and more professional, and “Age to Age” captures a sophisticated adult-contemporary vibe that’s a perfect time capsule.

The album starts strong with the encouraging “In a Little While”:

Then, Amy rocks out with Michael Card’s line-in-the-sand tune “I Have Decided.”

Ballads like “I Love a Lonely Day” and “Raining on the Inside” contained lyrics that plenty of young people (and adults) at that time could identify with.

The two first singles from the album — both cover tunes — marked a bolder direction for Amy. She hadn’t really sung songs like the classical-influenced “Sing Your Praise to the Lord,” in which songwriter Rich Mullins used Bach’s "Fugue No. 2 in C Minor" for the intro…

…or Michael Card’s “El Shaddai” with its Hebrew lyrics.

But both songs became immensely popular and helped launch Amy into the stratosphere. My two favorite songs are the last two on the album. The jazz-influenced “Got to Let It Go” and the tender “Arms of Love” stick with me.

It’s not a perfect album — “Fat Baby” is corny and forgettable — but Amy won her first Grammy for “Age to Age,” and it became the first Christian album to sell platinum in 1985. Most of all, it paved the way for so much more (some of which we’ll hear in coming weeks).

Photo credit: Myrrh Records