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Better Than a Hallelujah Music Video World TV Premiere on GMC
Saturday July 31, 2010
Amy Grant Releases ‘She Colors My Day’ EP on iTunes
Monday May 11, 2009
Christmas with Amy and Vince 2008 Edition
Monday November 10, 2008
Amy and Smitty Celebrate On Ice
Monday November 10, 2008
Autographed Mosaic Books Still Available
Wednesday August 20, 2008
Amy Grant: Looking Back, The Interview Podcast
Thursday August 7, 2008
Out With the Old
Tuesday August 5, 2008
View Amy’s pictures in the Amy Grant Fan Gallery
Amy Grant In Concert, Volume 2 (1981)
Somewhere Down the Road (2010)
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Artists get paid a royalty every time their song is played on broadcast radio. So the incentive for most artists is to come up with hits that will get frequent airplay.
A guaranteed way to get airplay is to write a holiday or Christmas album. During the holiday season, radio stations will ramp up their playlists to be heavily weighted towards holiday music as Christmas Day approaches. Many stations in the United States will actually begin a holiday music-only schedule just before Thanksgiving in November, meaning there will somewhere between five and six weeks’ worth of non-stop Christmas music. For some, this can be annoying. For others, it is truly the most wonderful time of the year.
The downside of this phenomenon is that there is a glut of mediocre Christmas music released every holiday season by the unlikeliest artists, including those whose religion (or lack thereof) would seemingly preclude them from creating such material. Barbara Streisand comes to mind.
And because Christmas music lovers tend to be conservative and traditional in their tastes, few artists venture into any kind of creative or experimental territory and rely on very traditional, time-honored song selections with very old-fashioned orchestral arrangements. Rare are the songs that stylistically break away or introduce a whole different, originally written Christmas song that no one’s heard of.
By the early eighties, Amy Grant’s career had begun to take off and success seemed to be increasing with every new album. To take advantage of the holiday cashcow, Amy came out with her own holiday album, simply titled A Christmas Album. This album was a revelation into what a holiday album could be if allowed to explore avenues not normally traveled by the average artist.
A Christmas Album is a varied blend of crowd-pleasing traditional holiday favorites done in the style of Andy Williams or Nat King Cole on tracks like Sleigh Ride and The Christmas Song also known as Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire (which both receive plenty of airplay on mainstream radio, by the way), but also feel-good eighties pop tunes like the catchy, Smitty-penned Emmanuel and Little Town, an updated version of the traditional hymn, O Little Town of Bethlehem.
Other updated treatments of traditional Christmas music include Angels We Have Heard On High and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. But what’s truly great is the originally written material for this album like the pop-country styled Tennessee Christmas, the catchy Love Has Come and the sentimental but inspirational Heirlooms.
And Amy’s voice is in fine form, her vocal talent taking shape with maturity and abundant confidence. It is clear that she’s on the road to bigger and better things by the time this album hit the shelves.
Amy would release more Christmas albums later on, but there never has been nor will there likely be a Christmas album with the tremendous variety of styles and a perfect balance between old and new that this one has. It would prove to be the milestone at the very beginning of her golden age.
Track listing
Tennessee Christmas
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
Preiset Dem Konig (Praise The King)
Emmanuel
Little Town
Christmas Hymn
Love Has Come
Sleigh Ride
The Christmas Song
Heirlooms
A Mighty Fortress/Angels We Have Heard On High
