Amy Grant reveals Vince Gill’s tough-love advice after bike accident
Amy Grant’s recovery led to a perspective shift.
The Christian singer, speaking with NPR’s “Wild Card with Rachel Martin” podcast on Thursday, April 30, opened up about the impact of her 2022 bike accident, which caused a traumatic brain injury. Grant, 65, told Martin that she “spent several months of quiet,” avoiding screens and talking on the phone. She leaned on her husband, fellow singer Vince Gill, for support.
“I just remember in the fall of 2022 when my world was very quiet. I just remember saying to Vince, ‘What if this is all I get back? What if this is it?’” she told Martin. “Because, to me, it’s like the world is in a conversation, and I am down the hall and in a back bedroom.”
She continued, “I love people making me laugh. I love delivering a great one-liner. But that doesn’t happen when you’re three steps behind the rest of the room.”
But Grant says Gill, 69, put things in perspective with a bit of tough love.
“‘Amy, life happens to every one of us every day,’” she says he told her. “‘You know, 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.’”
The “Baby, Baby” singer revealed in February 2020 that she was diagnosed with a heart condition called partial anomalous pulmonary venous return, undergoing open-heart surgery that June.
Then in July 2022, Grant was hospitalized after a serious bike accident in which she hit a pothole and was knocked unconscious near her home in Nashville. Grant told E! News in February 2023 that the trauma from the incident caused an existing cyst in her throat to become a “hypergrowth” that required surgery and relearning to sing.
The accident also caused other issues, including her short-term memory and balance, and led to a bout of depression.
Grant told Martin that it took two years to start writing music again.
“I started writing because I went back on tour and toured in 2023, but I’m just looking at all those people in the audience. A lot of them, if they’re not coloring their hair like I am, it’s gray. And they’re my contemporaries,” she said. “At some point I thought, am I doing us all a disservice by not writing about what life feels like now?”
She is set to release her first new album in 13 years, “The Me That Remains,” on May 8. She previously told USA TODAY that inspiration kicked in after a fit of cleaning closets at her Tennessee home.
“I picked up a pen and wrote a poem, ‘The Me that Remains.’ I was still recovering,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about writing, and my shortterm memory was a struggle at the time. It was so hard to write music because I couldn’t remember a lyric I’d written five minutes earlier.”
The album features her husband, their daughters Sarah Cannon and Corrina Gill, and longtime collaborators.
“I was going, this feels so good!” Grant told USA TODAY of the yearlong recording process. “I’m reengaged in a community that is filled with joy.”