Flamy Grant Is Playing Country Music in Churches: 'I'm Just Planting My Stiletto in the Sanctuary Now' (Exclusive)

When Flamy Grant put her foot down on the accelerator of her rented Dacia Sandero Stepway on a road trip in Scotland last year, she did her best to turn the music off.

“I drove all the way up from London in silence,” Grant, 42, tells PEOPLE. “I mean, I did listen to an audio book, but a lot of the time, I didn’t have any music on. I actually traded in my guitar while I was up there. I came home with a different guitar than I brought.”

Grant laughs, as it is life’s little detours that electrify the soul of the Asheville, North Carolina native turned award-winning and Billboard-charting artist who became a drag performer in 2020 and proceeded to go viral the very next year.

And while Grant — whose real name is Matthew Blake — lives quite a loud life as of late, she will also be the first to admit to being an introvert. "Flamy can be on and fun and flashy and do a meet and greet that's a mile long," she remarks. "But then I go home, and I take off all the drag and I just want to cocoon for a little bit."

Knowing what thy spirit needs certainly has come with age for Grant, who officially burst onto the music scene with the 2023 release of her debut record, Bible Belt Baby  - which went on to top the iTunes Christian Chart and score a No. 1 hit on the same chart in the form of the rally cry "Good Day." In doing so, she became the first drag performer to achieve such a worthy feat.

Related: Drag Queen Flamy Grant Feels 'Grateful' to See Her Music Embraced by Queer and Christian People (Exclusive)

And now, Grant’s current album CHURCH finds itself enjoying much of the same fate, but this time on the iTunes Country charts. Certainly, the storytelling woven into songs like the endearing single “Do It for the Song” has kept the eyes of the country music industry on her.

"Songs are my sacred space, and ‘Do It for the Song’ serves as a sort of invocation at the beginning of CHURCH," says Grant of her new single. "This is why I’m here. Kneel at the altar and get baptized in the beauty of the song."

She’s spreading this beauty in the most unusual of places also.

“I've actually played over 40 churches over the past year,” says Grant, whose Asheville home was thankfully spared from any damage due to Hurricane Helene last fall. "But yeah — there's also a lot of churches and people of faith who are not that thrilled at my existence in what they see as their space and as their world.”

That’s OK, according to Grant, as she has come to realize that some people just need time to let new ideas take hold, as she too comes from a stringent religious upbringing.

"I am from that world," stresses Grant, who served as a worship leader for over 22 years before finding her true calling. "It's funny when people say I'm invading their space, or I don't belong. I'm like, 'Baby… y'all raised me.' This is not criticism that's coming from outside the house. I've been here from day one. I’m just planting my stiletto in the sanctuary now."

Certainly, CHURCH is intentional in the way that it is targeted to queer representation in the church and, as Flamy puts it, the experience that American churches put queer people through.

"I don't want to call myself a prophet," she explains. "But I do I resonate a lot with the stories of the prophets in the Bible. There were people that were Jewish and Hebrew, and God called them to step out and do some really weird radical s---." She pauses. "You have to look at me, and I'm not going to let you ignore the fact that we've got some stuff to talk about."

Read the original article on People