Jars of Clay's first album, released in 1995, sold 2 million copies on the strength of the surprise hit single "Flood." With three subsequent albums, including the new The Eleventh Hour, the band has tried to reclaim some of that initial mass acceptance. It's found it a little bewildering -- not to mention frustrating – that the group's had so little success.
"We were dropped from play lists at radio stations when they figured out that we were Christians," recalls guitarist Steve Mason. "There was a perception change, and there still is. Hopefully, the events in this last year have hopefully opened up the opportunity for more dialogue about things of faith, issues of life."
With The Eleventh Hour, Jars of Clay once again tries to find a place for itself in two worlds -- a core Christian audience that has continued to support the band and a larger mainstream audience the band wants to engage in conversation about music and faith. In some cases, as with CDNOW, singer Dan Haseltine has taken to emailing editors directly, hoping to spark thoughtful discussion about his band's music and avoid being lumped together with negative stereotypes about his religion.
"We feel like our persona, who we really are and what Christianity means to us, would probably challenge a lot of people's assumptions," says guitarist Matt Odmark.
CDNOW: Are you emailing a lot of editors about their coverage plans for The Eleventh Hour?
Dan Haseltine: I'll send as many emails to editors as I have to. I don't mind doing it.
Steve Mason: As long as he doesn't send packages.
Talk about the struggle you're having trying to play two worlds.
Haseltine: It's been somewhat of an ongoing, very familiar place to be for Jars. We carry with us the perception that we are a Christian band. On one level, that's a great thing, and, obviously, it holds very true to what we believe. On the other, it has a lot of negative stereotypes attached to it when it comes to people who aren't familiar with what being a Christian is.
We've seen the perception of Jars of Clay as a freakish, Bible-throwing, rightwing, overly pious, religious band grow outside of what the reality of the band has been. So when we approach this record, we're just trying to be very smart about the way we contact people and say, "Spend a little time with us; be educated about what you're saying." That's important to us, that people know that we are not, necessarily, what the media has created us to be.
Mason: We believe that we have something to offer Christians as well as people that don't share that same belief. We write from a place … less of it is songs about faith, but more songs because of faith. That's kind of the window through which we see the world.
Has the band contributed to that perception, simply because of its name? You can't properly understand the band's name without bringing the Bible into it.
Haseltine: Then there's a band called Ministry.
Matt Odmark: That's a fair point. I think what Dan's trying to say is that "Christian" is definitely a part of our identity. It's who we are; it's what we believe; and it colors our music. Yet the way we understand "Christian" and the way our culture characterizes "Christian" feel like two distinctly different things. We don't want to say, "No, we're not Christian," because we are. Like you said, our name comes from scripture, and that is something we believe and hold true. We feel like it expresses something very true, not only about the nature of all of us as humans, but it also describes a bit of where our inspiration for music comes from.
Where it gets tricky for us, we want to be good stewards of who we are by constantly asking people to define their terms. Don't just carelessly call us a "Christian" band and allow all these untrue connotations that come along with that be lumped in with us. We do feel like we're distinct from those things.
In the mainstream media, you're basically seen as being a Christian band that had one big hit several years ago. Why should they pay attention to you?
Odmark: That's a completely fair question. You make a record, and you try to figure out how you made it. We could sit here and list off a bunch of bands that made a record and then either tried to make that same record again or completely went somewhere else, and it didn't take with the people who called themselves fans of that first record.
That said, we don't dismiss the last two records, but we feel like we've been learning a lot about how to make albums and how to play our instruments to where that's actually set us up to be in this space now. This fourth album, we produced it ourselves. [It's] just like the first record, in terms of who was involved creatively and how it all came to be. It's fresh, to us.
Even though your songs don't use a lot of "Christianese," some people may have a hard time hearing them outside a Christian context. The Bible is your most obvious literary source. What would people without any background in that, any familiarity with the language or the literature, hear in your music?
Haseltine: I can't necessarily say that this is just our perception of what we do, or that this is an outside perception, but I feel like we write songs that are about love and that are about loss, that are about longing. Those are things that transcend religious language.
But the metaphors and the phrases -- "the measure of days," references to the Holy Ghost -- that you use to describe those universal things are often specifically Judeo-Christian.
Haseltine: Some are. I would say that it's just higher literary language. It's not necessarily even biblical in that approach. At least, my intentions are not that they are metaphors and things drawn from scripture, but from other readings.
Have your affiliations with such organizations as Amnesty International caused tension within your core fan base?
Haseltine: I don't think they do. We really do look at fulfilling tangible needs as a responsibility of humanity in general. Given that, we do it without an agenda. Our agenda's not to help humanity so that people will come to know Jesus. We hope that, that would happen, but I think we're simply called to love people and to serve people without an end.
Maybe that's what separates it from some of the other types of core Christian humanitarian work. I don't become friends with somebody, hoping that I'll get a chance to witness to them, so I can put another notch, rack up another number of how many people I've saved or converted. It should never be about that.
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