Bethany Dillon

Bethany Barnard was born Bethany Joy Adelsberger on September 22, 1988, in Bellefontaine, Ohio.[1] She has said that she started playing guitar at age 10, with Jennifer Knapp serving as an early influence.[2]

Dillon performs at a Patriot Day ceremony at Fort Gillem in 2009.

Dillon's musical career began at age 13, ca. 2001, with the recording an independent album, Vulnerable, that ended up in the hands of EMI executive Brad O'Donnell. Reporting from the time says that audiences connected with her first record almost immediately, and result being several hit singles, and multiple Dove nomination. As well, the album received critical acclaim, and "an exponentially increasing grassroots fan base that propelled her career forward in great leaps". Her self-titled debut album, released in 2004, was the highest selling female solo debut album for the year, and attracted GMA nominations for both Female Vocalist and New Artist of the Year. The radio single All I Need reached the number one position on the U.S. charts.[3]

She released her second album, Imagination, in August 2005.[4] The CD prompted CCM Magazine to label her as "the future of Christian music".[4][5]

Dillon appears on the Music Inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe soundtrack of 2005, singing "Hero". One track from Imagination, entitled "Dreamer", is featured in the end credits for the 2005 film of the same name, starring Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning). A music video was created for this song, using clips from the film.

GMA's 2005 Producer of the Year, Ed Cash,[6] teamed up with Dillon to co-produce an eleven-track album, all of which were written or co-written by Dillon; the result was her 2007 album, Waking Up released on April 3. As described by Dillon,

Waking Up is the most joyful record I’ve made... even though it revolves around themes of brokenness and this feeling of being really, really small in the presence of God. When the Lord is growing something in me, it feels like a lot of things are dying—because they really are. And when the Lord is making things soft and vulnerable in me, it's really painful. But even so, I think this is the freest sounding project I’ve created.[6][7]

Joining Ed Cash in the co-production of Waking Up were Will Hunt and John Alagia (an associate of John Mayer and Dave Matthews Band).[6] As CBN.com explains,

Influenced for years by penetrating and poetic writers like Rich Mullins, Keith Green, and Sara Groves, Bethany has tended to gravitate toward themes that require a measure of courage and open-heartedness to explore... Waking Up embraces big questions of suffering, barrenness, vulnerability, romance, and faithfulness. Like the writers Bethany has modeled herself after, she proves herself willing to live and create in that place of ambivalent tension that inevitably comes from refusing to settle for easy, feel-good answers. And yet, like the psalmist, Bethany has a penchant for finding the redemption in the midst of the pain.[6]

Dillon's "When You Love Someone" appears as a track on the film soundtrack album, Music from and Inspired by Bridge to Terabithia.[8] In late 2007, Dillon and Sanctus Real opened with Steven Curtis Chapman on his Live in the Moment Tour.

On March 29, 2008, Dillon wed Shane Barnard of Shane & Shane in Xenia, Ohio.[9] In 2016, Dillon and Barnard released the song "Covenant", alongside a fundraising campaign to support a new, independent studio effort and recording to appear in 2017 under her new stage name, Bethany Barnard. [10] On February 10, 2017, she independently released A Better Word.[11][12]

• Official website
• YouTube Channel
• Thought Quotient - Interview with Bethany Dillon