A quiet hotel room, with only a cup of coffee and an unopened suitcase for company, is an appropriate setting for Amy Grant to talk about creativity. And about dancing in the kitchen.
“All of us need to deal with non-stop chatter in our mind,” said Grant, the six-time Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter, who hosted last fall’s inaugural “Live at the Lake Cultural SeriesLive at the Lake Cultural Series” at The Ritz-Carlton Reynolds, Lake Oconee. “That chatter is the enemy of creativity. Usually it is just all this negativity.”
Grant made a large and positive impact on the three-day creative weekend. Joined by two longtime friends—playwright Tricia Rose Burt and songwriter Leslie Satcher—Grant and friends inspired audience members to discover and nourish their creative side in a song writing workshop. They also starred in a private dinner concert at the Sandy Creek Barn where guests enjoyed music by Grant and Satcher, who writes with Grant’s husband, country music legend Vince Gill.
“I came away feeling changed,” Grant said of her Reynolds experience. “It was incredible. I would love to participate again. We all realized things about our personal creative processes. I brought things home with me that I incorporated into my daily life.” Indeed, back in Nashville, Grant applied those lessons from the weekend to the music studio she and Gill share at home. She gathered her collaborators around the kitchen table for a 15-minute exercise to describe an autumn day. “The exercise really connected us,” Grant said. These friends of nearly three decades learned things about one another they never knew. As thoughts were exchanged, one of the friends played a couple of songs. The second tune was so upbeat, everyone just jumped up and started dancing together. Right there in the middle of the kitchen. “That,” Grant said, “is the beauty of creativity.”
Reserve your space for this year's Live at the Lake Culture Series.Live at the Lake Culture Series.
Photography by Matt Huesmann
