Seattle songsmith SHAWN McDONALD talked to Mike Rimmer about his music and his fallow years of drug abuse.

Shawn McDonald seems to be beyond tired. He's jet lagged and the exhaustion has made him take to his bed. Now he has emerged looking worn out and yet sound checking for his performance tonight. Those around him are making sure he's ok and as we settle on a couch for a chat, his cap is pulled down over his eyes and his voice is at a low level as he conserves his energy.

With a new live album and a debut album 'Simply Nothing' which has become a surprising hit, Shawn is making friends wherever he plays. Standing on stage, his whole body seems locked into the performance with guitar, rhythm and voice making an enormous mesmerising groove even though it's just him and a guitar.

He seems as surprised as anyone that he is now in the spotlight. "I wouldn't have ever dreamed about being where I'm at," he admits. "It's not like ever since I was a young boy I dreamed of being a rock star or anything like that. I never had those ambitions or dreams. Music really wasn't even something that I considered myself good at. So when I started writing music, I just wanted to praise God, I wanted to sing him songs. So I would sit in my room and I would just sing away. Somewhere in there, I just started writing down my own songs to him and that's kind of where it all began. So it is surprising to me and I look at it as a God-thing. It just is too crazy to be me. I just pick up a guitar, I start singing and all of a sudden, I'm touring. Next thing I know, I'm signing with a record label and going international!"

When you consider where McDonald has come from, his success as a music artist is even more remarkable. Raised by his grandparents because his parents rejected him when he was born, Shawn struggled with the pain of that rejection. "My parents just didn't want a baby I guess when I was born," he reflects. "I had a lot of hurt and pain, I had a lot of anger and a lot of hate and issues towards my parents."

As a teenager, Shawn discovered drugs as he recalls, "I discovered that I could get high and have fun with my friends and at the same time I could hide from my problems and my pain. So I consciously embraced it and got wild there, became a pretty hardcore party kid. Somewhere in there I got the idea to grow and sell drugs, so that's what I did. I ended up getting busted for selling."

In the end, there wasn't enough evidence to convict the young McDonald but the bust acted as an initial wake up call. Promising his grandparents that he would straighten out if they sent him to college in Eugene, Oregon, McDonald moved away from home. However even with the fresh start, McDonald started dealing on the streets. He remembers, "I was dealing just about anything you can think of, from heroin to weed. I was doing it and selling it. Just really lost. I ended up getting busted again."

This time the police found drugs in Shawn's apartment and it really was a shock. "It really hit me and scared me. Because this time, I got caught red-handed and there was nothing I could do about it. There was no way I could weasel out of this one. So, everything just came crashing down. That's when spiritual matters really just became something that I needed to look into. I needed to find out, maybe there was something else worth living for than what I'd been dealing in."

Shawn continues, "At the same time there was this guy at the apartment where I was living named Chris that invited me to church every Sunday. He showed me love and was my friend. I think he started to make me think about spiritual things, whereas before, I wasn't really thinking about spiritual matters. I was sitting in my room one night and I had this Bible my grandmother had given me and I opened it up. I stuck my finger in and just started to read it. I just expected that if God was real, then he was going to speak to me and if he wasn't, then I was just going to carry on and keep living the way I was. I was still dealing up to this point, still growing, even after being busted twice. I opened up the Bible and I stuck my finger in and I started to read."

McDonald could not have imagined the life changing effect of reading a few Bible verses. He explains, "It was talking about cleaning the demons out of my house and all I could think of was the drugs. I just felt like God was saying the drugs were my demons. It just scared me, enough to where I got rid of everything. I spent the next couple of days just throwing it all away." Two days later, the police arrived at the apartment with a search warrant. He remembers, "They searched and couldn't find a thing. If they'd come two days prior I would really have been in deep water! So it really hit me hard and I decided that there was something about Jesus. I went to church and I got filled up. I don't know how to put it other than that. I got filled up with Christ and that's where it all began."

Despite turning his life around, the changes occurred slowly for McDonald. It took him a couple of months to stop smoking weed. "It wasn't doing the same thing for me anymore," he shares. "I'd get high but I had experienced God physically. I could sense God's presence in my body, where I'd never sensed that before. God had brought me life so when I did drugs, the high wasn't as good. I can't describe it any other way."

However even with his conversion to Christ, McDonald did spend a month in jail. "It was a little bit scary," he confesses. "I was just a young kid, I was 18-years-old. I think it was more of a wake-up call than anything. There were all these guys in jail that were there for all sorts of random crimes. Most of them were older men and their life was just crap, just falling apart. To me, I think God used it to show me where I was heading. They let me have my Bible in there and I just read my Bible and I almost read it from cover to cover. I read it a lot. So it was a good time to get away with God because I was in a foreign place with no comfort."

Since becoming a Christian, Shawn has already started building a relationship with his parents and dealing with the hurts. He explains, "My dad and I don't really have much of a relationship, he's a pretty difficult man to be around, to talk to and to share your life with. He's pretty consumed. My mom and I are slowly building. At the beginning it's hard because, she just wants to believe that everything is great and pretend it wasn't like she wasn't there for all the hard times and she wasn't there for all my life. I think she wants to take credit for even for the success that I'm experiencing when she had no part in who I am. So it's been real difficult for me to accept that and just look at my parents and realise that they're pretty screwed up people. Neither of them are believers and they're both just out there. I realise that even though I hurt so much growing up, actually I had it pretty good compared to what I could have been experiencing if I was raised by my real parents."

Shawn squints out at the audience from under his cap and talks quietly. I wonder whether he is always this laid back or whether it's just the exhaustion. I guess I'll have to wait for the forthcoming live album before I'll really know! The songs on his debut album come over well.

Does he enjoy ministering? "Yeah, though I don't have a lot of interaction with people on a deep level," he muses. "It's a lot on a shallow level because I'm going from city to city all the time. But I have kids come to me all the time, over and over again, and kids are emotional when they come up to me a lot of the time. I mean, literally in tears. I don't even really know why, other than that they say that the music that I'm writing is healing their hearts. The only thing I can explain from that is the music that I wrote was healing MY heart when I wrote it. Those songs are songs I believe God was instilling in me, that were healing me from my past, and I think that's what people are experiencing. I can't see what's going on but I see a lot of souls that are moved. I know it's nothing that I'm doing that could move them, so it's definitely God working and moving."

Shawn's new album was recorded live at his Seattle home town. 'Live In Seattle' was cut during a concert at Mars Hill Church in January, the 12-song acoustic set featuring McDonald on guitar, Neal Vickers on guitar and cello, background vocals from Cara Flory and in-studio contributions from Sixpence None The Richer's Matt Slocum. 'Live In Seattle' was produced by Chris Stevens, who also produced 'Simply Nothing'.

Says McDonald about his new album, "When the record label came to me with the idea of doing a live project, I flipped because I feel like what I do is best done live. Performing live gives me an opportunity to connect with people on a real level, and the audience that night was unbelievable. It was great to be able to share the evening with so many of my friends and family members from home. The album closes with 'Over The Rainbow,' a song I've been doing in my concerts. I love the lyrics, and think it could be a song written about Heaven."