Songfacts®:

• "How Do We Get There From Here" is Amy Grant's response to the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, where a former student killed three children and three adults. Instead of trying to offer easy answers, Grant points to America's deep political gridlock and asks what might happen if we set aside our divisions to find common ground.
• The tragedy hit Grant painfully close to home. One of the teachers killed was a longtime friend, while another close friend had grandchildren in the building. The children survived, but the trauma remains very real.
  
  In the aftermath, Grant joined a coalition of local artists, including Sheryl Crow, Allison Russell, and Margo Price, to meet with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee and state lawmakers to push for gun safety reform. While everyone agreed on avoiding another tragedy, they quickly hit a wall when it came to actual legislation.
  
  That sense of frustration sparked the track. The title frames a question rather than a statement, capturing Grant's uncertainty after walking away from those conversations. "When I sat down to write a song, I just kept thinking of the gridlock we had experienced that day and was there any way forward," Grant told The Sun.
• Grant brought in guest vocalist Ruby Amanfu, a Nashville singer known for her work with Jack White and a range of country and Americana projects. "I wrote the first verse and a version of the music and sent it to Ruby Amanfu and asked if she would like to help finish the song," said Grant.
  
  Amanfu had also taken part in the statehouse meetings, so turning the track into a duet made it a direct continuation of the dialogue that inspired it in the first place.
• Grant released "How Do We Get There From Here" on March 27, 2026, the exact three-year anniversary of the shooting. It arrived as a promotional single ahead of her The Me That Remains album.
• The song acts as a companion piece to the album's lead single, "The 6th Of January (Yasgur's Farm)." The opener focuses on national unrest, but "How Do We Get There From Here" brings things down to a personal level, searching for a way forward. Side by side, they're the most political songs on the record.
• The duet sits alongside a small wave of Nashville songs written in response to the Covenant tragedy.
  
  Kacey Musgraves' "The Architect" was the final song recorded for her 2024 album Deeper Well and won the Grammy for Best Country Song in 2025. It grapples with grief and a search for meaning in the light of the tragedy.
  
  Eric Church wrote "Johnny" the morning after dropping his sons at a school about a mile from Covenant. Hearing Charlie Daniels' "The Devil Went Down To Georgia" on his car radio inspired Church to invoke Daniels' fictional fiddler to fight off modern-day evils.