Amy Grant: Why Vince Gill Is So Tough to Shop for on Christmas

When Amy Grant and Vince Gill got married in March of 2011, they both had children from prior relationships — Grant had three young children, while Gill had one daughter — and the couple completed their family with the birth of their daughter Corrina in 2001. Juggling the needs of a blended family can be complex, especially at the holiday season, but Grant says that some of her sweetest Christmas memories are of the step-siblings’ evolution into a family unit.

“What I’ve loved, over the last 18 years of Christmases, has been to go from everybody kind of being on their best, polite behavior … to now having so much history together,” Grant explained to The Boot and other media outlets in 2018. “Now that we’re all grown, really, the gift is just being together.”

While family may be the greatest gift of all, presents are always nice, too. Unfortunately, however, Grant says that Gill is one of the more difficult members of her family to shop for. “Here’s the hard thing about shopping for Vince: He is an observer,” she explains, “so even if I’ve knocked it out of the park, he’s never gonna wave pom poms. Ever.

“Like, when you give somebody a gift that you’re excited about, you want them to go, ‘Wow, that’s awesome!'” Grant continues. “But when you give Vince a gift, his natural inclination is to consider all the possibilities of what it could have been.”

However, Grant shares, there is one present she’s gotten Gill that made his face light up: “Guy Clark was one of his favorite songwriters, and Vince was on the original session of a song Guy recorded called “Rambling Life,”” Grant recalls. ”Guy, I guess he was 40 when he wrote the song, and Vince was 25. The whole song was about the father passing away, and all the memories. When they took a break, all the musicians were in line for the pay phone to call their dads.”

As moved as Gill was by the song that day, Grant relates, its meaning took on a whole new level of resonance for him 15 years later. “It just so happened that when Vince was 40, his father died, and suddenly the song was his reality,” Grant explains.

“I got Guy’s number through a mutual friend, and I said, ‘Would you hand write the lyrics to [the song]? I’m gonna frame it with museum framing for Vince.’ So he said, ‘I’ll send it to you in the mail,’ and I was waiting and waiting,” Grant remembers. “When it showed up, I opened it, and he had, with a blade, cut out of his composition notebook the two pages … He had cut out the original lyric. And we have it framed in our home. I just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, no wonder Vince loves this man, and loves his memory.’

“He did react to that one,” Grant adds with a laugh.

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