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.

Shane Everett and Shane Barnard

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.

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.

If there's one psalm that is really about our life and even about this album, it's Psalm 73. "Song of Surrender" is pretty much that psalm set to music. That shows up throughout the album in that we see the world around us and we're, at times, envious of it in different ways. We see the things that others indulge in that we can't indulge in as Christians. We walk through those struggles. But the Lord reveals to the psalm-writer where that path leads—to destruction. The psalm includes the proclamation of, "Who have I in heaven but you? There's nothing on earth I desire besides you." Even though our heart and flesh sometimes fail, he is still our portion. There are a lot of shiny things here on earth, but the Lord shines greater than them all. God designed it so he would be our delight, not these other things. We declare this about God in our lives and in our music partly because we have tasted it, but also because we want to taste and understand it more.

You seemed to adapt Scripture to your lyrics more on your past projects, but a little less of it on Carry Away. It seems these lyrics include more of your personal thoughts.

Barnard: I think this album is a little more interpretative of Scripture, exploring what it means. I wanted to keep the truth behind it while exploring what it means to me personally. "Be Near" and some other songs near the end of the album work into the phrase, "As for me, the nearness of God is my good." What does that look like in my life? The songs are personal meditations for me to better understand what that means, to better make sense of that nearness. So the songs tend to start with a sentence like that and explore that thought throughout.

Everett: Every song we wrote is on the record. We didn't choose from dozens of songs. That's just the way it worked this time.

How does the songwriting process come about for you?

Barnard: For me, it's always very personal. I really haven't found a formula, and we'll never come up with an album because "it's time for another album." It'll be done when the Lord gives us direction and the songs come. Not that developing a time of writing is bad, because I want to a lot more than I do now. But my history is weird because music was never my hobby or my passion, so it's all pretty new for me.

Everett: You just won't see us taking a theme and writing a song for it just because we want to.

Barnard: I can say that every song on the album was written in under an hour-words, music and everything. That's just usually how they come.

How does all that translate into your concerts?

Barnard: I'd like to think people are leaving our concerts with a deeper desire to seek after God. I want that much more than them getting a CD on the way out or thinking about attending the next concert. I'm scared to death to exalt people or music over the Lord. Our hopes are that the Lord will clearly be bigger than the music at our concerts.

Everett: Each song is specific, and that's awesome. Even though we are a band, it doesn't feel like it. We were talking the other day and we feel more like a circus—a Christian circus. The tent goes up and we start up the revival atmosphere in a sense.

Barnard: We are proclaimers by nature. We try to seek after the Lord, hold the Scripture high and let it do what it does. It's interactive and the Spirit lives through it.

Learn more about the Shanes at our artist page for them, which includes a review of their album Carry Away. You can listen to song clips and pick up your own copy of their album at Musicforce.com.

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