“I grew up on Christian singer/songwriters like Jennifer Knapp, Margaret Becker, and of course Amy Grant,” says Flamy Grant, namechecking the CCM icon who inspired her drag name.
CHURCH, out this week on Shamus Records, a subsidiary of TRO Essex Music Group, is Flamy Grant’s second album of genre-blurring and gender-bending queer Christian country/folk, and it’s her first written fully with that persona in mind. Grant, a North Carolina native, dressed in drag for the first time in 2019, and released her first album under her new identity, Bible Belt Baby, in 2022. “I hadn’t written 10 songs as Flamy yet, so I was pulling from my repertoire that preceded my foray into drag,” Grant says. “This record was my first opportunity to compose an entire album in Flamy’s voice.”
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Sometimes, that voice was captured in the spur of the moment as a smartphone demo, as in the case of the single featuring Ricky Braddy that she released for Pride Month this year. “’S.P.R.K.L.’ is probably the only song I’ve ever written via dictation to my smartphone. I wrote it while driving around on tour last year. It was just a vague melody and a jam-packed lyric when I brought it to the studio in Nashville, and the band transformed it into a country-funk earworm,” Grant says. “It’s essentially my answer to a question I get all the time: Flamy, how do you handle all those haters?”
Grant’s haters have been vocal, but they’ve probably done more to make her famous than to slow her down or discourage her. Last year, worship leader and failed Congressional candidate Sean Feucht criticized Flamy Grant on X (formerly Twitter), making a dramatically apocalyptic comment, “These are the truly last days,” over the existence of the Christian drag queen musician. His bigoted remarks unintentionally sparked a positive backlash, as fans embraced Flamy Grant and sent both Bible Belt Baby and the song “Good Day” to the top of the Christian music charts on iTunes.
@flamygrant
Y’all i just now saw the first part!!! You know Pastor Greg Lock and his lion shirt wanna do drag sooooo bad.
♬ original sound – Flamy Grant
Flamy Grant reflected on that controversy on CHURCH with “Last Days,” a song co-written with Karyn Thurston, who also sings backing vocals on the song. “If these truly are the last days, let them be the last days of bigotry, shame, and gatekeeping,” Grant says. “American evangelicalism and the people like Sean Feucht who still carry its torch are laughably impotent when it comes to spiritual integrity.” More recently, a pastor named Greg Lock gave a sermon mocking Flamy Grant, who responded with wit and grace in a viral TikTok.
Amidst Grant’s rise to fame, she was featured in publications like People and Entertainment weekly, and won the 2023 Kerrville Folk Festival New Folk Competition. After raising funds from over 500 fans on Kickstarter, Grant recorded CHURCH in March at Nashville’s Forty-one Fifteen Studios. “It’s so amazing to have a community of supporters fueling my music, and I’m beyond grateful,” Grant effuses. “I wanted to make a Nashville record that featured as many queer players as possible, and we achieved that goal with the incredible team my producer Ben Grace and music director Megan McCormick brought together.” The album opener “Do It for the Song” is an homage to the craft of songwriting itself, tying Grant’s unique story to the broader musical traditions that inspired her.
CHURCH features hooky, upbeat songs full of heart and humor, but it also traces the complicated journey of a Christian who’s begun to practice their faith outside the CHURCH. “It’s an album about reckoning and confrontation, but also about reconciling, reclaiming, and, ultimately, leaving,” Grant says. “I am no longer part of the CHURCH, no longer part of a local congregation or a broader denomination. I have left. My spiritual life, however, has never been deeper.”
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