Simply Nothing

“I can’t communicate how crazy I was,” Shawn says. “Who I was then and who I am now is like night and day. You name the drug and I was selling it and doing it. I was a confused kid, and my confusion boiled up into bitterness and anger. My life had become a hard, closed shell. I was extremely rebellious, miserable, and lost. What God has done in my life in the last six years is amazing.”

Shawn was once notorious for the trouble he caused. He was the kind of kid most people had written off as hopeless. Nowadays he’s recognized instead for his ingratiating and disarming transparency and for his sparse, eloquent, laid-back musical stylings. Shawn’s story is a moving testimony of abandonment, despair, hope and redemption. His songs are a sophisticated blend of organic instrumentation, such as nylon guitar, cello, violin, and harp, mixed with hip-hop sensibilities and a passionate flowing lyric.

Expressing his insatiable hunger and thirst for God, the lyrics on his major label debut, Simply Nothing, reveal a personal maturity of belief that prefers a hard truth over a feel-good lie. Shawn consistently refuses the easy way out in life, art, or theology. Instead, hope, redemption and worship are discovered in the context of real searching, struggling, questioning, and pain.

“So here I am on a stage, and I don’t know why. I’m deathly afraid of being in front of people. When I started playing my songs in front of people five years ago, my knees would shake because I was so freaked out. If I tried to talk I would start crying. So the only thing I could do was sing.” “But God met me in the middle of my weakness and fear. He said, ‘This is the life I have for you, this is where you’re going,’ and I said, ‘Okay God, my life is Yours. Let’s go.’ So here I am.”