This year, Amy Grant’s hit single “Baby Baby” turns 35 years old. The song, off the 1991 album Heart in Motion, gave Grant her first chart-topper as a solo artist. Previously, she had hit Number One as part of a collab, the 1986 duet with Peter Cetera “The Next Time I Fall.” In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Grant, who had made her career to that point in the Christian music space, says her record label at the time worried she couldn’t carry “Baby Baby” alone.
“They wanted me to duet with somebody. They talked about Aretha Franklin,” she recalls. “They said, ‘We need to deliver it in a brown bag. Who’s gonna listen to this from the girl from the Contemporary Christian Music world?’”
After a radio station in San Diego began playing “Baby Baby” and listeners started furiously requesting the song, Grant proved she could indeed make waves as a pop singer. She remembers the moment she realized the song had blown up: when she was recognized at a Nashville area breakfast spot.
“Touring had been big before that, but my life had still felt private,” she says. “I remember walking out of the Donut Den and some girls from Hillsboro High School were next door and they started screaming.”
Grant released her latest album, The Me That Remains, in May. It’s a record that finds the singer-songwriter probing life in her sixties, and all the challenges and blessings that go along with it. She kicks off a tour in support of the LP on Wednesday in Decatur, Georgia. Watch her full episode below.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by Deputy Editor, Head of Country Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, the Black Crowes, Carly Pearce, Luke Grimes, Brandon Lake, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Noeline Hofmann, Adam Mac, Devon Gilfillian, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Ne-Yo, Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanan, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, Love on the Spectrum‘s Tyler White, Willie Nelson scholar John Spong, and authors Marissa R. Moss, Josh Crutchmer, Mark Gray, and Jonathan Bernstein.
