Search - Amy Grant :: Time Again: Amy Grant Live (Bonus Dvd)

A Great Time for Any Friend of Amy's

The JuRK | Our Vast, Cultural Desert | 10/01/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Amy Grant takes the same stage where she gave her first performance 28 years ago (1978!) and gives a wonderfully intimate show on a set dressed like a living room.



I've seen her concerts several times over the past couple of decades and she always puts on a terrific show. Her choice of songs for this CD/DVD covers her career and touches on the many levels her music has taken her, from her Contemporary Christian beginnings to her pop hits.



If you're a fan of Amy's (from any point in her career), you won't be disappointed. She's still strikingly beautiful, she sounds great, and she still touches hearts with her songs."

Great Live CD

F. Norris | Phoenix AZ | 10/01/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This live CD is very well done. The audio is great, you'll think you are at the concert. Just enough chit-chat between songs....to make it interesting. The audio is fantastic. Amy and her band sing their old hits with a fresh new arrangements and you also get to hear a few songs that weren't radio hits, but are fabulous. Excellent CD........check out the live DVD of this concert also."

A Testimony to the Surprising Endurance of Grant's Music

Chip Webb | Fairfax Station, VA | 03/08/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Amy Grant's music, while always enjoyable and well done, on the surface has rarely reached an artistic level that you might think would stand the test of time. Grant reached her artistic peak to date with Lead Me On (1988), a superb album that in the 1990s widely was considered to be the best contemporary Christian album ever released. (It still deserves that award, IMHO.) Her next studio album, Heart in Motion (1991) catapulted her into the pop stratosphere with its five top 20 hits (four of which reached the top 10). Since that pop success, only the musically spare, mostly acoustic Behind the Eyes (1997) and the overproduced but underrated pop of Simple Things (2003) have hinted at the depths plumbed in Lead Me On.



At the same time, however, artistic depth is not always the greatest good. Grant's radio hits and other pop songs have impacted lives because they are so practical, down home, warm, and full of emotion. Quite simply, they radiate a simplicity and goodness that make them both attractive and relevant. Grant's new live album, Time Again ... Live, commendably shows you both her artistic side and her pop sensibilities. It helps that Grant is a very good stage performer; while I wasn't that impressed with her the first time I saw her live in 1986 on her Unguarded encore tour, her 1995 Decade of Hits and 1998 Behind the Eyes shows both were excellent.



The CD itself works on two levels. First, it's a wonderful trip down memory lane for those who have followed Grant over the decades. Second, though, it shows you that Grant's music endures the passage of years to a degree that you may not have thought possible. Freed from its mid-1980s technopop effects and long opening and closing segments, "Stay for Awhile" packs a greater wallop by bringing to the fore the non-sappy memories of two friends; it's a timeless song. The four hits from Heart in Motion found here still are enjoyable pop tunes 15 years after their initial radio play. The one charting single and three more serious tunes off of Simple Things give you some sense of the depth of the largely ignored album and are played better here than on the original recording.



It helps that Grant clearly is not content with pulling out the hits here. (Otherwise, she should have included at least one song from her first successful crossover album, 1985's Unguarded.) There are more than enough familiar radio singles, to be sure, but there are also a large number of very good tracks that never got their due before. (How many people remember that Grant was the first to record the Will Jennings [cowriter of the Celine Dion smash "My Heart Will Go On" from the film Titanic] pop song "Oh How the Years Go By," which only later became a hit when Vanessa Williams sang it?) Grant was inspired when growing up by 1970s singer/songwriters such as Carole King and James Taylor, and you can hear that influence in just about every song here. (You can also see in pictures and on the DVD, which exists to promote the complete Time Again ... Live DVD [purchased separately], a living room stage set that clearly apes Carole King's living room stage set from her tour two years ago.)



The missteps here are few. It's both surprising and disappointing to find "Lead Me On" as the concert opener. This seminal, important song is an emotional high point and, given its weighty subject matter, needs a buildup of songs with related themes beforehand. (Grant and her bands created such a context in her mid-to-late 1990s tours.) And while Grant is backed by a very good band, I would argue that her prior bands (particularly the one on the 1998 Behind the Eyes tour) were better because they creatively extended many of the songs. The band on this album pretty much follows the studio versions to the letter, although they occasionally shorten some songs. The album's final track, a new studio recording of Grant's "In a Little While" (off of her 1982 Age to Age album), does nothing except for give Christian radio a single with which to promote Time Again ... Live.



Still, if you like Amy Grant's music, you should buy this album. It will remind you of why you have liked her and may just show you anew, as it did me, how she is not to be taken lightly."