Amy Grant - Behind the Eyes

This one came out of left field for me. I had never heard of Amy Grant, though I certainly heard her on the radio every Christmas season. Other publications apparently point to a long-standing Christian music career, the echoes of which are barely heard on Behind the Eyes. This sounds like someone who has their life together trying to write a Sheryl Crow or a KD Lang record. The 90s session cats are all shredding, the voice is emotive, the optimism in the darkness is still there, but the songs are more sentimental and suburban, and it’s overall more Bakersfield than Los Angeles.

The record opens up with bouncy, harmonically rich backbeat-pop ode to small-town USA, “Nobody Home”. It then enters a groove of smooth love songs with big choruses. She’s always holding back a little more than a pop diva would, but that restraint keeps her from falling down the ravine into Alanis Morissette-isms. She pulls mostly from broader experiences in the lyrics, with a bit of a folkie touch.

I know it might seem like I’ve been pretty easy on the mixes for the past few reviews, but this is genuinely a very good pop music mix. If I was making a pop record for a vocalist who wanted to shell out for a backing band on the record, I’d use this as a mix reference. Excellent country-inflected arrangements, good Hammond use. The electric guitars are the only thing that’s a little iffy (the poky baritone on “Cry A River” and the caveman solo on “Turn This World Around” for example) but I’m a rock guitarist by trade so I get to be picky about that sort of thing.

There’s a lot of sections where I like to imagine that the session cats or Grant talked the producer into making a bolder choice than I would have expected from a Christian artist in the late 90s. The modal mixtures in the middle eight on “Like I Love You”. The reggae harmonica on the chorus of “Takes a Little Time”. The swirling Beatlesesque “Leave it All Behind”. This album absolutely deserved to break out of the Christian music ghetto, and it’s a shame that it didn’t.

Behind the Eyes by Amy Grant is a good album, and I like it.