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I was able to steal away a few minutes of Amy Grant’s busy schedule to ask about her new song, “Better than a Hallelujah.”

As with any interview, I did plenty of preparation and research about her music and her life. But I was surprised that she began by asking me about the song, as it relates to my personal experience with suffering. What you see below is a testament to Amy Grant’s “tell it like I see it” attitude, complexity as a Christian, and genuine interest in connecting with others.

Amy: I heard that you had heard “Better than a Hallelujah” and really connected with it because you were a two-time cancer survivor.

Billy: Because of the suffering I went through, I have a real heart for anyone who can capture the emotional and spiritual aspect of suffering. I feel that you really captured that well in “Better than a Hallelujah.”

In the first few lines you say, “God loves a lullaby, in a mother’s tears in the dead of night, are better than a hallelujah sometimes...” and I thought to myself, “Wow, this is a bit strange—how does God hear crying as a lullaby?” It wasn’t a happy-go-lucky song. It hit the truth of suffering both for the person and for God; namely, that it’s a demonstration of faith.

Amy: I feel the same way about that song even though I didn’t write it. The songwriting is incredible and I just want to give credit where credit is due. I do write a lot of my material and I wish I had written that song. But I felt the same way. My mom and dad were on the roller coaster of dementia, which is basically a downhill slide, and two weeks earlier had buried one of my dearest friends, Ruth. She had died from cancer. It was a third return. She was diagnosed September 11 and died October 6—it happened so fast. We were having other family issues—it was a really, really tough stretch.

I was in the middle of so much angst and sadness when I heard that song. I remember when someone sent it to me in an email and I hit “Play” again and again and again.

Billy: It seems like the song was written for you. I know songwriters sometimes just write a song hoping that someone will sing it, but the more I listen to it and, knowing some of your story, it seems like you were supposed to sing this song. Do you feel that way?

Amy: Well, I was just glad I heard it. It felt so familiar to me. As somebody who lives in a town where there are a lot of amazing songwriters, I hear great songs all the time. When I hear an amazing song, my first thought is, “Please somebody get that out on the airwaves.”

I heard a great song that was written by an MTSU graduate named Erik Paslay—he’s got such an amazing voice—and Kenny Alphin, who is “Big Kenny” from the country duo Big and Rich. The song is called “Less than Whole” and it’s about forgiveness. I think to myself, “Why is that song not on the radio, and why is nobody picking that song up?” And I always feel that about songs.

Billy: How do you see yourself as a singer and performer? Do you see yourself as someone who is supposed to help “get that song out there?”—as a messenger, if you will.

Amy: For me, it’s always about the music. In my experience music facilitates the experience of someone being able to articulate a certain experience, or maybe experience it for the first time. Most of us probably live a lot of our lives on auto-pilot where we are just accomplishing the lists, or there is a lot going on but there isn’t time for a good, hard cry. We’ve got to get through the day and put food on the table. We have to accomplish the task that people depend on us to accomplish.

Music is like a flower that grows up through the cracks in a sidewalk and you say, “No way! How did anything break through that wall?” It’s an amazing instrument for connecting us.

Billy: Because I was able to personally connect with “Better than a Hallelujah,” I don’t know if everyone feels this way, but I wonder if this song is best understood by people who have been through hard times. Will those people “get it” best? Will people who haven’t gone through great suffering understand the song just as much?

Amy: Wow—I  don’t know. I agree with you that you have reasons to connect with that song, but I don’t think others can live life and not connect to that song. The first week that the record came out I traveled around and went to record stores and book stores and took my guitar. It was very non-glitzy. There was a time in my music career where there was a lot of positioning and glamour and glitz, and it was a very ‘90s kind of experience. I feel like what I do now is more grassroots. It’s been a long time since I put out any new music, and an especially long time since I put out a song that everyone was so eager to sing along to. I was standing with my guitar at a bookstore with maybe a hundred people singing at the top of their lungs. I looked around at war veterans, moms, kids in wheelchairs, 17-year-old girls that look like models, and we’re all singing “beautiful the mess we are”—and I lightheartedly stopped and said, “yes, you are a mess” and we were all laughing together.

Billy: You mention the song lyrics, “Beautiful the mess we are,” and I think that is such a beautiful and yet confusing phrase. Will you explain how being a mess can be beautiful to God?

Amy: Well I immediately thought of the verse, “In our weakness He is strong.”

In the ‘50s and ‘60s the church environment had so much to do with performance and the way things looked. In the south, at least, it was the time of Andy Griffith, and people’s lives were falling apart like they have since the dawn of time. There was less honesty and vulnerability. People didn’t have all the social media-types of ways to be connected, and so a lot of times you went through things in isolation. There was one phone in the house and if somebody was going through something, you certainly were not going to spill your guts the three times a week you went to church. You were going to put on your nice clothes, put on a smile, and worship God with everyone and then go home. If your daddy was drinking himself into a stupor every night or if you were sleeping with your boyfriend and too ashamed to say anything, you didn’t have anywhere you felt you could turn.

I was just talking to my kids about how the culture has changed. The things that used to cause angst for us when I was growing up is nothing now—everything goes. But we are still a mess and need God and friends to help us get through. And needing God like that is beautiful.

Billy: This idea of culture changing and the need to change the way we communicate begs a bigger question: what exactly are you trying to do with your music? What do you see when you sit down to write or record a song, or travel around the country performing your music? What are you trying to accomplish?

Amy: I’m always trying to connect with people. I use the word “connect” a lot, but I want to connect people to each other, the things they believe in, the love of God, forgiveness, and things that are active and alive.

Growing up, I was in my mid-teens before I heard anything about the Holy Spirit. It was like there was this giant scale hanging in the distance at the point of death, everything good you did would be weighed on one side and everything bad on the other, and depending on where the needle tipped would determine your eternal home—there was no forgiveness.

I started going to a church in Nashville that was music oriented and it was life-changing. At the same time I was going to a secular all-girl school. I went to the head of the school and asked if anybody could start a chapel program. I told them I didn’t feel comfortable speaking, but asked if I could sing. So I worked up some Joni Mitchell tunes and James Taylor—I sang Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” And then I wrote songs about Jesus—because the beauty of the Gospel is that it finds us right where we are. My life was being changed.

Those were my beginnings and I always kept to that same pattern. I sing songs about regular life and people will say, “Oh that song reminds me of spring break,” or, “That song made me dance.” And in the middle of those warm and fuzzies, I’ll sing a song that is really meant to speak to them. Like “Better than a Hallelujah” says, “God loves a lullaby and a mother’s tears in the dead of night.” I’m not trying to hit them while their guard is down—but I’m trying to create a familiar landscape and they often go, “That’s me, that’s me.” And then when I sing a song that presents the Gospel, they go, “Oh my goodness, that’s me too.”

Billy: Some of the lyrics read, “the woman holding on to life, the dying man giving up the fight, are better than a Hallelujah...We pour out our miseries, God just hears a melody. Beautiful the mess we are, the honest cries of breaking hearts, are better than a Hallelujah.”

I hear those words and they hit so heavy. It is easy to understand, and yet it’s so complex because we’re talking about God’s nature. When he hears us send up those honest cries, it’s because we believe He can change our situation—and that He’s good. If we didn’t believe that, there would be no reason to send up those honest cries.

As you say in the album’s title song, “Somewhere Down the Road,” the “why” questions are so tough, but we ask them because we believe He’s good and that He has the power to change our circumstances. In the back of our minds it’s almost harder to understand, but even when He doesn’t change our circumstances, there’s a reason for that too—and it’s all out of love.

Amy: If I could add to that—holding on with that last shred of hope, almost everybody has hope that He’s in control. The reality is that He is in control and is taking care of us. I look at my life and I’ve been married twice, I see years that I created a lot of damage, and years where I see that my ashes have gotten on everybody, and still it is a weekly part of my life to look back and see that all along God was in control. He was never not in control. He was in control the morning I spent with Ruth the day that she died. He was in control then too. I have to believe that and take a deep breath and say, “Oh my goodness, all things work together for good.”

I was in the waiting room for the multiple times a loved one tried to take their life, when I asked, “It’s not going to end like this, right? This is not the end.” and say “All things...”

A dear friend of mine that I’ve written songs with together for years killed himself at the end of April and I went to see his mom and dad. They were at his house, and when I was driving up I said, “Ok, it’s either all things, or it’s not at all. Either it’s hogwash, or everything fits under His control.”

Billy Atwell is coordinator for the Colson Center.