Aaron Shust – Finding A Way

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Aaron Shust had done all of this before. He’s been in and out of the studio for well over a decade. He’s performed in venues of all kinds from coast to coast on countless tours. Yet combining the experiences into his first live album recording, the newly released Love Made A Way (Centricity Music—buy), was something different altogether—a “nerve-wracking” recording session.

Fortunately, the emotions gave way and the studio time yielded the same thing Shust always produces: a beautiful worship experience. Love Made A Way combines familiar favorites with worship covers and brand new songs for an intimate yet powerful worship set. We recently spoke with Shust about his song choices, the emotions in the studio and how he almost refused his way out of a musical career in the first place.

CCM Magazine: This is your first live recording. How did that feel compared to previous recording experiences?
Aaron Shust: It was nerve-wracking. I’ve already watched the videos and I know myself more than anyone else, so of course I can see what other people will not. Even my wife didn’t think I was nervous, but I’m watching myself the whole time knowing I’m thinking about the chords here or singing the right words there, because some of these are brand new songs. I did my due diligence to go over the new songs ad nauseum at home so that the lyrics were second nature, but it still didn’t help. It’s like when you go to a party and have to introduce someone and you lose their name.

There’s just something about the live experience with the camera right up in your face that you realize there’s no going back. There’s safety in a studio recording where you can run a pass twenty times and pick your favorite. However, on the other end of the spectrum is that there’s so much energy in the room. The band had played through the set a couple times and the crowd came in for that last night. We were in a studio, not a church setting, but you can make music and worship anywhere, so that’s what we did.

The energy in the worship that day was amazing. My wife was in the front row, and the ability to watch someone I know and love become so engaged with the Heavenly Father in worship through a song that we’d written just a couple weeks earlier, or a song we’d been singing for ten years, was pretty powerful.

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