Canter Bridge

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From one important angle, this is the Amy Grant album we were waiting for and knew she could make. The depth, the knowing pathos, and the quality of expression raised Amy’s game to a new level.

From another, the breakthrough is bitter sweet. I refer here to the widely acknowledged fact that with this CD Amy became a pop star as well as a Christian music star. We who knew here since ‘El Shaddai’ felt a lingering sadness as she walked out of our smallish concert hall and into the big, wide world as a quasi-sex symbol who could be assessed for the quality of a love song without saying anything further about the faith that generates her song.

We applauded, of course. But we also breathed a prayer for the soul of a child who had grown up with us as she took the plan to the Bigs.

She sang so beautifully here. ‘That’s What Love is For’ is arguably her best song ever. She knows, as she sings these lines, that love ‘talks us down from the ledges’ long enough to give it another chance. And ‘Ask Me’ is riveting for its hope that God is able to restore things broken so badly that it’s hard to find the edge where one piece used to join the other.

Amy was a woman on this album, no longer a girl and no longer a woman in the making. She sang without apology like the real thing, rearing back with confidence on her own hind legs and letting fly. It was a beautiful thing.

Too soon Amy would discover in her own experience that love does not always talk us down from our ledges as her sixteen-year marriage to Gary Chapman ended in divorce. In ‘Galileo’, she had sung that ‘Even on the darkest night // Oh, I will find the shining light of our love’. That determination was to prove less than a marriage required.

The love songs on this album are tinged with sadness, knowing that they were enough to get through to the end. Our sadness once again followed Amy out a different door.

There is grit here. Amy kicks artistic and spiritual butt with ‘You’re Not Alone’. She is all big sister who’s been there and is *not* going to let the evil thing happen to her little one:

I saw you walking by yourself
Your eyes were crying out for help
I know you feel your pain is more
Than anyone’s been hurt before

You’ve got to remember (got to remember)
You’re not alone in this world
Always remember (got to remember)
You’re not alone in this world
You’ve got to remember.

But rescuing grit is not the only strength she portrays. There is always, tenderly, strongly the valor that knows how to remember a life-long lover with the dignity that time requires:

I will be walking one day
Down a street far away
And see a face in the crowd and smile
Knowing how you made me laugh
Hearing sweet echoes of you from the past
I will remember you

I will remember you
So please remember
I will remember you
I will remember you
I will remember you
I will remember you.

Yes, Amy was all growed up in 1991. So were we who knew her early on. We always freeze an artist a bit too early in her development. Good grief, she was middle-aged already. But her stature washed over us with this CD as we’d not had the opportunity to feel it prior.

It was a good, deep, cleansing wash.