Amy Grant is back with new music. After releasing “Trees We’ll Never See” in March, marking her first release in ten years, the six-time Grammy Awards winner is back with “What You Heard,” a vulnerable and painfully honest track she penned alongside Natalie Hemby and Barry Dean.
“This song came directly from a therapy session with one of my kids,” Grant explains in a press release. “Sharing a bloodline with someone does not guarantee a relationship. Relationship requires showing up and listening. It takes practice to build a better communication tool kit and on the other side, sharpen our receptors; but it’s worth the effort to keep trying, to keep communicating. At 62 I still have a lot to learn.”
Hemby, who is a close personal friend of Grant, lauds the recent Kennedy Center Honors recipient for her numerous accomplishments, and for being brave enough to write the deeply personal new track.
“There’s a reason Amy is a Hall of Fame writer,” Hemby boasts. “She takes her personal experiences and runs them through a lens we can all see through and relate to. The day that she, Barry, and I wrote this, she was sharing her own missteps in some of her closest relationships… how you think you think your words are reaching out to someone, when, in fact, they are only pushing them away. It was deeply personal for her, but I found it was deeply personal for me too.”
Grant’s last full album was How Mercy Looks From Here in 2013. By her own admission, the wife of Vince Gill didn’t plan on waiting a decade before releasing more music. But after being seriously injured in a bike accident last summer, Grant realized she had more she wanted to say, and was ready to say it.
“So much creativity has been put on hold in my life, for all kinds of reasons,” Grant explained on the Today Show. “Last summer I was asked to sing on a new Cory Asbury song yet to be released. This might be one of the best songs I have heard in a long time. I was so glad they waited for me to heal up and get back to the studio. Inspired by Cory’s beautiful song, Marshall Altman and I started talking about songs that we’ve written recently that affected us.
“I played him one of mine,” she recalled. “He played me one of his. His song was ‘Trees We’ll Never See.’ I loved it immediately and asked him if I could record it, and within two weeks, both songs were mixed and mastered!”
Find “What You Heard,” “Trees We’ll Never See” and all of Grant’s music and upcoming shows at AmyGrant.com.