Jan Willem Vink reports on CCM star AMY GRANT who has recently released the 'House Of Love' album

"Matt was kind of wrestling around on the bed and wasn't really listening. He said, 'What do you mean by singing? What?' I said, 'Well, I was talking about the fact that I started singing a long time ago and I'm sure I'll quit one day...' 'What?!' He has the exact opposite reaction. 'You're going to stop singing?' I said, 'I have five more records in my contract, I'm going to be in my 40s when it's time for me to resign. Who would want a 40+-year-old singer? There will be other things to do by then. You will be in high school...'

"Matt said, 'Momma!' He was getting teary he's highly emotional. 'If you stop singing, I won't have a stage to dance on!' And Millie, just as a beat went by, looked at him and said, 'Oh Matt, build your own stage.'

"Is that not a first child and a second child? The first child constantly kind of reaching back behind him, touching mommy and daddy: who am I? Are you right there? The second child -Millie's biggest fight with me is she says, 'I have a plan, I have things I want to do, we nevel, evel, evel do my plan, we always do youl plan. I have a plan!' (Amy laughs.) She's four and a half. I'm going, 'Well, I know the feeling honey!'"

Back to the song "Children Of The World". "When Wayne Kirkpatrick and I were writing the lyrics for 'Children Of The World', we just tossed back and forth, like: 'Okay, you sing through it with what we have so far.' It's not like some kind of grand performance, but just to keep it fresh while we were working on it. I found that I couldn't really do it, because I got choked up. And I got choked up in the studio too, for a lot of reasons. The song started off just to affirm the value of life. We're created by God and that's our value, it's not what you wear or what you do, it's not what you acquire or accumulate, it's that you are created by a loving God. He said, 'I set your value when I decided what you were worth, and you are worth the blood of my Son. There's not a lot of argument in that. That's kind of where the song started.

"It took weeks to write that song. We kept talking: what is really the point of that song? What it kind of evolved into, if this is really how we feel about life, this is really how I feel about children and people, then really I am compelled to live differently. First I thought the whole song was focused on children, but the way it turned out, it really is focused on adults. I think it's saying, just live it! Let's stand for something. And as adults let's give them a legacy of living life that makes them look forward to living life. Even if I sing it, I'm thinking; 'What an interesting process my children will find, because they will perceive me as having it all together - because I'm so much older than they are, they don't really see my struggles.' It's interesting that kids are so filled with hope, and then they come to the painful conclusion that life is you walk and you fall down, get up, walk and fall down, you get up and walk."

"House Of Love", the title song, ended up being a duet with well-known country singer Vince Gill. He's a friend of Amy's. Originally, Amy would sing the harmony vocal herself, but she found it was beyond her ability. "It was the first week of December of 1993, I had just come back from singing the week before at a Christmas special with Vince for TNN. As I was leaving the studio, I asked the engineer to dub a copy of that song. You know Vince could sing this. I approached Vince and said, 'Hey Vince, will you do a song with me on the record?' He said, 'Sure.' And I'm thinking, 'Don't you want to hear it?' That is very typical of Vince. He just is that kind of guy. He is so gifted. He's very warm and caring of other people, and if you ask him to do it, he will do it. He came and sang and did a great job. I had never sung on tape with him before and it really sounded pretty incredible. I had already sung my part and he sang his part, and we were just sitting there, listening to the speakers, and playing it back. I looked at him and said, 'I've got this weird feeling that we'll probably be singing this song ten thousand times before we die.' This big goofy grin broke out on his face and he said, 'That's how the good stuff happens.'"

The old Joni Mitchell hit "Big Yellow Taxi" is a special highlight of the album for Amy. Says Amy, "We had actually finished the album and I just kept thinking, 'Boy, something is really missing here.' I was talking to a girlfriend of mine and she said, 'You know Amy, you love all your old stuff, put something old on there.' And 'Big Yellow Taxi' just presented itself. My favourite part of the process was calling Joni's office. I said, 'Would you please give her the message, if there's anything that she would like to change as it is 20+ years later.'

There's a little section of the song where it says, 'They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum, and charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see them.' The message I got back was, 'Let's count for a little inflation - why don't you charge 25 bucks?'" (Amy laughs.)

One of the songs that has a more spiritual background is "Love Has A Hold". Amy explains the background: "I had a conversation with somebody who had just buried their brother and I don't know what this man thinks about God, but he said to me, 'Do you think his body is decaying in a box up on a hill? Is this it?' I said, 'No, that's not what I think, but let me think about it.' I went home and wrote 'Love Has A Hold On Me'. It was so humbling to realise that I don't really know what happens. And really, what we as Christians say about eternity is much more of a conversation experience. Because when you really think about what we know biblically about the hereafter, it doesn't say a whole lot. We cannot talk bravely on about something that none of us have ever experienced, and that's very humbling."

Many artists basking in the bright lights of superstardom go a little crazy. It has happened with U2-singer Bono, wearing horns on stage. It has happened with Madonna, openly displaying all her sexual vulgarity. It has happened to Michael Jackson, who in a seemingly desperate act to gain credibility has married the daughter of Elvis Presley. Amy credits her upbringing for much of her ongoing stability.

"I think the way my parents brought me up has had a profound effect on how I assimilate all of this action/busyness/hype - my life. It's just basic biblical teaching, that there is not one person more important than another person, that our value as people is not set by what we have or what we accomplish.. God sets our value, he decides what we're worth and he decided what he was willing to pay for us, which is the blood of his Son. Regardless of how I feel about myself on any given day, I know what my value is as a person, and I also know what the value is of every person that I meet, whether they have accepted the level of sacrifice of Jesus or not, that is still their value in God's eyes. I think that basic level of being brought up with that respect for people sort of puts in perspective the phenomenon of getting attention.

"I will go places with my kids sometimes and school-aged children will talk about me loudly, saying, 'There she is, that's Amy Grant,' and my son Matt will say, 'You know mama, they all love you.' And I quickly say, 'Matt, what they love is the songs that I sing. You love me because you know me, but what they know is only my music.

"I wake up on the farm and my life is basically my family and my work, writing songs and recording is all a very private process. I wake up in the morning and I have dirty hair and no make up, I slip into some cut off t-shirt and some blue jeans shorts and with a cup of coffee I walk down the driveway to get the newspaper, and somebody drives by and I say 'Hi', and my eyes are puffy because I've gotten very little sleep...just normal everyday life."

However normal Amy may be, she is in certain ways a figure largely discussed by the world at large. How does Amy handle this? "What I do as an artist is what I feel like, and then I write songs about it. So when you ask me what I think about people's opinion of what I do, there is nothing farther from my conscious mind than someone else's opinion of what I do. The fact that anybody would have a discussion about me at the dinner table... get a life! I mean, who cares? I don't care what they think. Why do they care what I think? You know, the record company may say, 'Brush away the flaws and the old acne scars,' but the fact is everyone of us wakes up in the morning and we do the best we can with the life we've been given. Sometimes we put our head on the pillow at the end of the day and say, 'Good job', and sometimes we think, 'What a waste!' I just assume everybody else is the same way... and it all flies by so quickly! So my contentedness comes in saying why be anything else? It's not going to add another day to my life, it is not going to take away the pain that is there, it's not going to make the sweet things sweeter or the horrible things less horrible.