Art offers a snapshot of the inner workings of an artist at the moment that piece of art was created. In the case of music, since most records are a collection of several songs, a record can be a particularly insightful journey through the heart of the composer. In fact, it could be argued that the performing songwriter is the most vulnerable of all artists--being both the one who creates the art and the one who brings it to the masses. Well, welcome to Amy Grant's heart of darkness. With Behind the Eyes the first lady of Christian pop presents an unvarnished set of musical reflections on life, love and loss. Grant is no stranger to these themes, but she has never approached them with such a sense of harsh realism. And unlike the title cut from Lead Me On (1988) and "Ask Me," from Heart in Motion (1991), in which she sings of the pain and anguish of others, here almost every piece is sung in first person, not surprising considering she wrote or co-wrote 10 of the 12 tracks.
In fact, from the first line of the opener, "Nobody Home," Grant makes it clear that this isn't going to be what you're expecting: "Main Street U.S.A. boarded up and dry...." Not exactly "Every Heartbeat."
That sense of uncomfortable honesty continues and grows as you get deeper into Behind the Eyes. The airy production throughout contributes to the feeling of nakedness that permeates this record. Most of these songs have an open feel and sparse arrangement that enhances the feelings of loneliness ("Missing You"), sorrow ("Cry a River") or resolve ("Every Road"). The acoustic-based production gives off a vibe not unlike the "unplugged" segment of Grant's 1996 House of Love tour.
In "Like I Love You" Grant asks the hard question, "Why do lovers drift apart/And how does love fade away?" In "Cry a River," perhaps the record's boldest song, Grant lays bare the sadness of a forbidden love that "...was a long wait/It was just the wrong time." Here she reveals a struggle that almost makes the listener feel like an intruder, "How do you argue with a feeling in your bones/'Bout what is and what isn't meant to be?/Some things you live with/And you never let it show/Like the pain I felt/The day I watched you leave."
Grant also addresses issues of truth and trust with a feeling of being burned once too often. In "The Feeling I Had" you can hear the fatigue in her voice as she admits, "I cannot take the heat," and goes on to say, "I'm just a little weary of/All the talk and all the buzz.../Words are cheap and sometimes cruel/And stuff you hear is seldom true/And all I ever wanted was/The feeling I had with you." In fact, by the time Grant sings, "So much pain and no good reason why" on the last song, "Somewhere Down the Road," she actually sounds like she's approaching exhaustion. Catharsis can take a lot out of you.
But the strangest thing about Behind the Eyes is that throughout this deluge of brutal honesty, a thread of hope remains. In "I Will Be Your Friend," Grant pledges, "I'll make you laugh at a broken heart." In the record's first single, "Takes a Little Time," she notes with forthright clarity that things definitely need to change, and--eventually--change they surely will. In "Turn This World Around" she hopes that, "Maybe one day we can turn and face our fears." In "Every Road" she faces both the true difficulty of a committed relationship ("There you go making mountains out of such a little hill/Here I go mixing mortar for another wall to build.../I'd be lying if I said I had not tried to leave a time or two") and a determination to survive the struggles ("But there is nothing that we can't resolve when love's at stake"). And most significantly, in "Somewhere Down the Road" she knows that there are "mighty arms" that "hold the answers at the end of the road."
The record's two most engaging tracks also contain a sense of the hopeful grounded in the reality of life. In the acoustic shuffle of "Curious Thing," Grant discovers that life is "seldom what it seems." And only in the escapist "Leave it All Behind" does she hint that there still may be a pop star left after all this soul-baring. Although she confronts a friend's sense of a trapped existence ("You say your life is all but chiseled out in stone/And all you want is just a taste of the unknown"), the ultra-singable chorus--reminiscent of 1986's "Stay for Awhile"--and lilting guitar break aptly give the record its most truly carefree moment.
So Behind the Eyes is not a total downer--as it seems to be on a first listen. It's just that the hope here is a sober, melancholic hope. It's a distant hope seen confidently from a thick, heavy reality. In a time when many listeners are screaming for more authenticity and less candy-coating on their Christian pop, Amy Grant--at considerable risk to her "image"--bravely delivers a heartful of unadorned truth. -- Derek Wesley Selby (c) 1997 CCM Communications, Inc.
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