Amy Grant on How Vince Gill Supported Her During Brain Injury Recovery

Your spouse should always be your biggest cheerleader, and that’s exactly the role country superstar Vince Gill played for his wife, contemporary Christian music icon Amy Grant, as she recovered from a grueling 2022 brain injury.

In a new interview on NPR’s Thursday (April 30) episode of Wild Card With Rachel Martin, Grant explained how she tried to re-engage her brain during recovery, staying away from phones and screens. “I lived in my backyard with my shoes off in the grass, just writing and trying to recall things,” she said of the period following her 2022 bicycle accident, which left her unconscious for nearly 10 minutes and with a concussion. “It really wasn’t until two years later that I started writing songs. I didn’t realize I was putting together a record. I was just writing one song at a time, and ‘The Me That Remains’ was the first song.

“The Me That Remains” is the title track for Grant’s forthcoming LP, her first in exactly a decade. On the road to that album, which included many moments of self-doubt and self-deprecating comparisons to her younger self, the Grammy winner received poignant advice from her husband.

“He just said, ‘Amy, life happens to every one of us every day,’” she recalled on the podcast. “‘A virtuoso musician could have a stroke and never be able to pick up their instrument again. All you do is you just take the hand you’re dealt that day and live the life that you get.’”

With that advice, Grant felt more comfortable getting back into the swing of songwriting, eventually asking herself, “Am I doing us all a disservice by not writing about what life feels like now?” To answer that question, she wrote and recorded the 10 tracks that comprise The Me That Remains, the penultimate of which features Gill, whom Grant married in 2000.

Set for a May 8 release via Thirty Tigers, Grant’s new LP marks her first full-length project since 2016’s Tennessee Christmas, which topped Contemporary Christian Albums and reached No. 31 on the Billboard 200.

Grant has sent three albums to the top 10 of the Billboard 200 across her nearly five-decade career: 1991’s Heart in Motion (No. 10), 1992’s Home for Christmas (No. 2) and 1997’s Behind the Eyes (No. 8). Over on the Billboard Hot 100, she’s earned a pair of chart-toppers: 1986’s “The Next Time I Fall” (with Peter Cetera) and 1991’s “Baby Baby” (two weeks).