Grant, Gill Thisclose

12/24/1998 at 12:00 AM EST

Amy Grant and Vince Gill are now an item -- so sayeth the songstress herself. Grant told The Tennessean this weekend that her close friendship with Gill played no part in her divorce from Gary Chapman last spring after 16 years of marriage. "A lot of disparaging things were said about my very public friendship with Vince," Grant said. "One of the reasons that the friendship was so public was because it never occurred to me to hide it." When her daughter Millie, a fourth-grader, asked her recently if Gill was her boyfriend, "I kind of took a breath and said, 'He is, honey. Yeah.' " Gill, divorced from singer Janis Gill since 1997, released a duet single with Grant in 1994 called "House of Love."