Laura Story

A vocalist and tunesmith rooted in the Christian faith, Laura Story first gained notice as the bassist for the rock outfit Silers Bald. She later stunned the CCM audience by writing “Indescribable,” the Chris Tomlin vehicle that held the genre’s summit for seven straight weeks. Although trained on double bass and never envisioning a front-and-center career, she entered the group after encountering singer Shane Williams at Columbia International University. Across four Silers Bald projects she supplied the low end, yet by 2000 she sensed a separate vocation and stepped away to record on her own. While finishing her first collection she still lacked one song, so she dashed off “Indescribable,” which ultimately titled the album and reached far wider once Tomlin carried it onto the charts and into sanctuaries nationwide. Maintaining momentum, she independently issued her second set, There Is Nothing, in 2005 even as she served as women’s director and pastor at Perimeter Church in Atlanta. That project earned her a contract with INO Records, which brought out Great God Who Saves in 2008. Two years afterward came Blessings, her first release to top the Billboard Christian albums chart. After INO rebranded as Fair Trade Services, Story returned with God of Every Story in 2013 and the holiday recording God with Us in 2015; the latter enlisted Steven Curtis Chapman and Brandon Heath plus, on several cuts, a 120-piece choir and 50-piece orchestra. In the first months of 2017 she unveiled the single “Open Hands,” which included Third Day’s Mac Powell, before delivering her fifth studio album, likewise titled Open Hands, that same spring.