Clockwise, from
top left: Gill and
Grant on their
wedding day;
the blended
family (with
friend, far right)
on a 2009 trip
to South Africa;
Grant at a 2010
American Red
Cross letter-writing program
to benefit
the military.
Sweet
Harmony
back,” says Grant’s sister Carol Grant Nuismer. And though
they work in the same field, they refuse to compete, appreciating each other’s gifts. Grant calls her singer/songwriter/
multi-instrumentalist husband “a freak of nature.” And Gill
says of his wife: “It never fails to amaze me how captivating
the sound of her voice is.” But it’s Grant who gives voice to a
deeper reason their union has lasted—and why it even began:
“We both wanted it so bad.”
WHEN THE TWO SINGERS first worked
together in late 1993, their lives seemed
settled. Grant, a mother of three, was
married to gospel singer Gary Chapman.
Gill was the husband of Janis Oliver (of
the singing duo Sweethearts of the Rodeo), with whom he
had a daughter. But neither marriage was especially joyful,
and the Chapmans’ union, as Grant describes it, “had been
rocky from the get-go. I’d been holding steady for 15 years
in something that was not easy to hold steady.”
Grant’s pain was evident to her sister Nuismer: “Some-
times when people try to stay in [a marriage] with unresolved
issues, they begin to shut down. It’s like you see them dying.”
Around the holidays of that year, Grant and Gill played
three events together in one night. “I knew from the tips of
my toes that he was unlike anybody I had ever met,” Grant
remembers, “and that I related to him on such a cellular
level. I was just so overwhelmed by him as a person that I
finally came up behind him and wrapped my arms around
him and said, ‘I’ve needed to do this all night.’ ”
The feeling was mutual, but Gill held on to his decorum.
A Soul
Connection
“He went, ‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’” Grant recalls. “It was
weird. It was all caught on film, too.” Not long after, Grant
invited him to record a duet, “House of Love,” that friends
and critics alike agreed was magical.
Grant’s obsession with Gill caught her by surprise. She
incorporates prayer and worship into her daily life, and
had become, at 19, the burgeoning Contemporary Christian
movement’s most celebrated singer. Michael Blanton, part of
her management team for 30 years, instantly saw what was
happening. He and Grant sat up late one night in the middle
of a tour and had a heart-to-heart. “Amy, what are you going
to do?” he asked. “What are you going to do?”
“I could definitely see that she had made a soul connection
that was different from anything she’d ever had,” Blanton
says. “She was working out the details of that in her mind, go-
ing, ‘This is where I am in reality in my life, but now, how do I
put this thing together?’ It was an incredibly tough struggle.
It brought into question everything about her faith and her
desire to be a woman of integrity.”
At first, Grant and Gill did nothing but brood. He wrote
gorgeous songs of longing—“Whenever You Come Around,”
“When Loves Finds You”—that advanced his career but not
his well-being. In private, Grant noted on a legal pad each
time she was around Gill. “[Vince] just made a profound
mark on me every time and confirmed there was somebody
out there who gets me,” Grant says.
There was no cheating, Gill insists, and neither spoke to
the other about leaving their spouse. “We were both married,
and though we were crazy about each other, we thought,
‘Well, that’s not our life.’” Friends (CONTINUED ON PAGE 76)
