Ain't That a Shane?
The acoustic/pop worship duo of Shane Barnard and Shane Everett could not care less about the spotlight—unless it's focused squarely on God. They'd have it no other way.
by Michael Herman | posted 9/29/2003
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Many of us say we're serious about "seek ye first" and making God our top priority. But few of us really live it. We've hung out with Shane Barnard and Shane Everett a few times, and they strike us as guys who really do live it. These guys truly do shy away from the spotlight, preferring to point to Christ instead. And that comes through loud and clear in their music—including on their most recent CD, Carry Away (Inpop). When we interviewed them several months ago, their song "Be Near" was burning up the Christian radio charts in three formats. So that's where we started our conversation.
Shane Everett and Shane Barnard
What's story behind the song "Be Near"?
Barnard While we were tracking Carry Away, I wrote "Be Near" on a piano, and we just threw it on the album at the end of our time in the studio. It was just piano and vocals at that time. When our label, Inpop, heard it, they loved it. They asked if we could add a few things to it to make it more radio-friendly. So, we created another version that was more "stringy" than the album version. And a later version is stronger and more driving, which came out of [Inpop co-founder and Newsboys frontman] Peter Furler hearing it and loving it. He wanted to put even more of a radio stamp on it. We fought it for a few weeks because we didn't feel it was necessary, and we certainly weren't going to pay for it. We aren't the Newsboys, and we liked our version.
But everything worked out. We threw down the vocals and some guitar, and they did the rest. It was good to hang out with Peter and to really get to know his heart. The rest was out of our hands. K-LOVE radio's Jon Rivers got a hold of a copy through Peter and really liked it. Then he put it in their rotation within a few days of first hearing it. It helped to get the song out there in a big way.
We've heard the song on three different radio formats. Which is your favorite version?
Barnard I like the album version. I think it captured the song best.
Everett I agree. We don't really have a vision for a song when we go into the studio. It just kind of unfolds as we complete the recording. That version of the song really captured the passion of it.
How intentional is the order of the songs on Carry Away? What path does it take the listener through?
Barnard I don't know that we had much of an intentional path we were going for. Lyrically, there are a couple of common themes, but we really didn't take that into consideration when we thought about the song order. If there's anything we considered, it was if someone wanted to have a devotional time with this album, we'd have songs No. 6 and on be more devotionally minded. So, those songs kind of flow together without a big loud song in the middle of an intimate time with the Lord.
Everett Everybody wrote a list of the order we thought the songs should be in. Then we just read our lists and talked about why we thought certain songs made sense in relation to other songs. After that Shane told us how it was going to be (laughs). Actually, that was all we needed to complete the final order.
Are all the songs on Carry Away new, or did you write some of them years ago?
Barnard One of them, "When I Think About the Lord," was someone else's song. Pretty much all of them came out in the last two or three years. Even though there are still some Psalms concepts on this project, the Lord is saying something through all these songs. What the album really says, from song to song, is that God is better—better than all of this "stuff" we have. We really need him to continually show us that, because we don't always believe it.
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