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Jars of Clay
Jars of Clay Bio
In order to find balance, neither of two sides can exist without
the other.
It’s that dichotomy of living in the physical and human
world that Jars of Clay explores in their new project Good
Monsters, giving both longtime listeners and new fans a glimpse
at the veteran band’s creative dichotomy as well.
It’s not about eradicating one side to glorify the other.
It’s about figuring out how to reconcile one with the
other. It’s about finding the good within the monster.
Speaking of finding balance between two, it’s within
the first two seconds of the opening track that you’ll
realize Good Monsters is unlike any Jars of Clay album you’ve
heard before.
It’s certainly a departure from the band’s most
recent recorded work, 2005’s acoustically driven hymns
collection Redemption Songs. When guitarists Stephen Mason
and Matt Odmark make their blisteringly electric entrance
on the track Work, when Charlie Lowell’s piano slices
through, when the rhythm section of bassist Aaron Sands and
drummer Jeremy Lutito make their presences felt, and when
vocalist Dan Haseltine reveals, “I have no fear of drowning/it’s
the breathing that’s taking all this work,” you
sense you’re in for a little different experience than
you’ve had from these guys in the past.
It’s transparency by design, an expressed desire to
speak truth, as they see it, at the very moment they experience
it. “There’s more urgency in these songs. There’s
more honesty,” Haseltine says. “In a way, we’re
weighing in on the bigger conversations we’ve kept ourselves
out of for a long time. The conversations about relationships
or social justice, but recognizing we don’t have to be
the voice of the church.”
At the same time, much of the lyrical content on Good Monsters
hone in on intimate emotions. “I had a talk early on
with Matt talking about the lyrics, that some of these songs
were focused in on such a small amount of an emotion,”
Haseltine continues. “Jars has pretty much tried to focus
on some ‘big picture’ ideas. When we write songs,
the lyrics can tend to be pretty lofty, and this season has
represented more of being comfortable with not sharing the
whole front end or back end of a story, but just sharing the
moment you’re in.”
But what spurred the dual notion of creating a big, loud,
in-your-face musical experience that also chronicles the minutiae
of a momentary feeling? Again, it’s the dichotomy of
the internal and the external. “First, there was this
singular intention of making a real rock ‘n’ roll
record,” Mason says. “The other part was to take
what Dan was wrestling with and communicate a lot of the ideas
about community and reconciling the best of who we are with
the truth of our own darkness. Those are two different things
that happened independently and yet worked well together naturally.”
Those items fit together in lockstep through tracks like
the opener Work and the follow-up track Dead Man, the album’s
first single, which wraps internal conflict in the record’s
most upbeat musical setting. It emerges on Mirror and Smoke,
a collaboration with former Sixpence None The Richer singer
Leigh Nash; on Light Gives Heat, a treatise on how ill-natured
the attempt at good works can sometimes be; and on the epic
Oh My God, a three-part exploration on both purposeful and
unintentional intersections with God.
“I think there are more lyrics in that one song than
there were on our entire last record,” Haseltine says
of Oh My God. “People all have their reasons for crying
out to God. Some of those are really deep, deep doubts, and
one of the questions in that third verse where it asks whether
Jesus is real or not. Growing up in the church, I was scared
to death to ask that question, because I didn’t know
whether the Gospel could stand up to the scrutiny. There are
times when I wrestle with that even now, but it’s a question
that needs to be asked.”
It’s the work environment the members of Jars of Clay
built for themselves while creating the songs for this record
that helped bolster the courage to ask these kinds of tough
questions. After a dozen years of writing, recording and touring
together, the core members Haseltine, Mason, Odmark and Lowell
felt it was time to shake up the way they work, and so they
hunkered down in a room with longtime tour bassist Sands and
new drummer Lutito (and the extra ears of arranger Ron Aniello)
to shape the song ideas they had collected over the previous
several months.
When they entered Nashville’s state-of-the-art Blackbird
Studio with engineer Vance Powell with songs intact, recording
sessions became about existing as a band, playing and singing
live, with many of Good Monsters’ final tracks emerging
almost exactly as you hear them now.
“All the hard work had been done, and we went into the
studio knowing we had good songs we felt confident in,”
Mason says. “We were trying to access a place that the
ear probably detects subtly, capturing the spirit of people
playing together and enjoying it, that garage-y, fleshing-it-out-in-real-time
feeling.”
It doesn’t take long to pick up on that feeling; you
simply let that spirit fly out of the speakers. It even shows
on acoustic songs like There Is A River, originally written
as an experimental bluegrass tune; and on Surprise, a quiet,
loping look at the nature of new experience. There’s
also a spirit of reverence for creative pursuit running through
Good Monsters, as shown by the presences of guests like Nash,
Ashley Cleveland, Kate York and the cover of Julie Miller’s
All My Tears, a longtime staple of Jars’ live show.
“That was a scary song to try to do,” Haseltine
says. “We thought we had to tailor it to make it a little
more rock and roll, and we were really scared because we wanted
to honor how the song was originally written, about [singer/songwriter]
Mark Heard and by Julie, who’s experienced so much chronic
pain in her life. All of these aspects go in to the song,
and when we finished, we thought it was good, but it was really
scary that we did it
this way.
“But then [Julie’s husband/acclaimed guitarist
and songwriter] Buddy Miller came into the studio, and we
just sat him down and played it for him, and he loved it and
he said, ‘Julie’s going to think this is just an
amazing gift.’ That allowed us to have a lot more confidence
about it.”
There’s no doubt confidence and experience played a
part in Jars of Clay wanting to step out and try this new
musical approach. Again, it’s the balancing of dichotomy
that truly allows excellence to shine through, and a freedom
that washes over the results.
“I think we’ve taken the pressure off ourselves
for trying to be a voice into anything bigger than us, in
a way,” Haseltine says. “What I mean is that we’re
coming to grips with that sometimes our smaller conversations
are just as significant as trying to explain the context for
religion in America in four-minute songs.
“I think we used to think we had to do that all the
time, that if we were talking about something we had to find
the exact right context for it, and make sure that it made
the right sense, but this record isn’t about that,”
he continues. “This record is a lot of those kinds of
moments where I’m going to have to be comfortable giving
my assessment of what’s going on right now, even in the
midst knowing that I’m probably wrong sometimes. There’s
a tremendous freedom in that, and that’s what we’re
enjoying now.” Courtesy jarsofclay.com
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