Disney World, Jimmy Buffett… and Amy Grant? Somehow, Yes.

If you’ve visited Country Bear Musical Jamboree at Walt Disney World lately, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the voice of Mac McAnally. If you spent any time around a Jimmy Buffett show, you’ve definitely heard him there too, as a longtime member of Coral Reefer Band.

Oh, and casually, he’s also a 10-time CMA Musician of the Year winner and a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

And now, somehow perfectly fitting into that résumé, McAnally is also the producer behind Amy Grant’s deeply personal new album The Me That Remains.

Honestly, after talking with him, it makes complete sense.

McAnally lights up the second Amy’s name comes up. Before they ever worked together, he was already a fan. But after years of sessions, live performances, and eventually producing this new project, his admiration only deepened.

“She is the same person to every day, to everyone in the world,” McAnally told CCM. “She’s not a made-up character. She is who she is.”

Then came the line that probably sums up Amy Grant better than almost anything else ever could:

“Even atheists know that she’s an angel.”

What started as two songs quickly became something much bigger. According to McAnally, Grant initially reached out simply wanting to record a little new “content.” But one session changed everything.

“We cut two songs in one session,” he said. “And she called me the next morning and said, ‘I forgot how much fun that is to be in the room with musicians. I don’t want to cut two songs. I want to do a whole project.’”

That joy became the thread running through nearly every story McAnally shared about the making of the album.

“And that’s the way it was all the way through the project,” he said. “Everybody involved in the project, including second engineers and every musician and every singer, was just a text stream about how much joy there was in making this music.”

That’s especially fascinating considering The Me That Remains is not a lightweight record emotionally. Grant openly wrestles with aging, healing, trauma, faith, and survival across the album. But McAnally believes the joy came from Amy herself.

“She had a lot of life since she made her last full album project,” he said. “But there’s nobody better to write a recipe for navigating serious life situations than Amy Grant.”

He especially pointed to “Beautiful Lone Companion” as one of the most magical moments he’s ever witnessed in a studio.

“There’s not one track on this album that I don’t smile when it starts,” he said. “But ‘Beautiful Lone Companion’… that’s one of those songs where I know I’m not good enough to take responsibility for what happened.”

McAnally described watching Grant record parts of the vocal live during tracking, something he says still gives him chills.

“The fact that I was there when that happened is a life highlight for me.”

By the end of our conversation, McAnally kept coming back to one word: Not nostalgia. Not legacy. Joy.