Good For Me

Album: Heart In Motion (1991)
Charted: 60 8
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Songfacts®:

  • Name the three female singers who released an album in the '90s with at least four Top 10 hits. Mariah Carey of course. Janet Jackson had five on Rhythm Nation. But who is the third? It's not Madonna, Shania, Whitney, Celine or Alanis.

    It's Amy Grant.

    Her Heart In Motion album from 1991 has the #1 "Baby Baby," the #2 "Every Heartbeat," the #7 ballad "That's What Love Is For." By the time the fourth single, "Good For Me," was released, radio stations knew that Amy Grant's catchy pop songs would hook their listeners, or at least wouldn't cause them to reach for the dial. It got added to lots of playlists and went to #8.

    The reason you don't think of Grant in the pantheon of '90s pop stars is because she didn't have any other Top 10 pop hits that decade. Her upbeat contemporary sound captured a moment at a time when music was starting to fray around the edges, with rock going grunge and hip-hop going gangsta. Grant was there with pleasant pop songs that were easy on the ears.
  • "Good For Me" is an "opposites attract" song about a couple with very different tastes who blend together perfectly. Grant wrote the song with three other writers: Jay Gruska, Tom Snow and Wayne Kirkpatrick. Jay Gruska also co-wrote "Friends and Lovers" by Gloria Loring and Carl Anderson; Tom Snow worked on the #1 hit "Let's Hear It For The Boy" by Deniece Williams (from the movie Footloose). Wayne Kirkpatrick had been collaborating with Grant for a while and also worked closely with Michael W. Smith.
  • Amy Grant was well known in Christian music circles, where she emerged in the late '70s when she was still a teenager. She writes most of her own songs, and in the mid-'80s decided to spread her wings and write some more secular songs that hold true to her values. Her first song marketed to pop radio was "Find A Way," which was a minor hit in 1985, but the next year she landed a gig duetting with Peter Cetera on "The Next Time I Fall," and that song went to #1. By 1991 her pop sound was more refined and she was able to break into that market on her own.
  • Grant was married at the time to another CCM singer, Gary Chapman. In the "Baby Baby" video, Grant gets cozy with a model named Jme Stein, which upset some fans who demanded emotional veracity in her videos. Undeterred, she had Stein reprise his role in the "Good For Me" video, but this time he's a celebrity with ladies who hound him for autographs as Grant claims him for herself.

    Grant and Chapman ended up getting divorced in 1999; a year later she married the country star Vince Gill.

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