American pop rock phenomenon JARS OF CLAY are back with a new album. Mike Rimmer quizzed the band's singer Dan Haseltine.

Jars of Clay

Dan Haseltine from Jars Of Clay is settled into his seat in a Nashville office waiting to chat to the media about the glories of the band's third album, If I Left The Zoo'. In case you've missed the Jars phenomenon over the past few years, the band made a monumental impression on the CCM scene when their self-titled recording spawned the crossover hit single "Flood". Opportunities to tour with Sting, appearances on high profile TV shows and a cabinet full of Dove Awards and Platinum discs followed and suddenly these four guys from Greenville, Illinois had amassed two million record sales for their splendid tunes, wistful singing and urban rhythms. A pile of sound alike bands were hurriedly signed by desperate record companies jumping on the bandwagon but despite a much copied sound, nobody managed to emulate anything near their record sales.

Their follow-up to 'Jars Of Clay', the neo-concept album 'Much Afraid', was a bit of a sales disappointment! It only managed to sell one million copies! So now they embark on their next recording and it's time for major changes. You see, Jars Of Clay have a problem. Three million album sales and the band remains an anonymous enigma! Just who are these guys? Do the band have any personality?

Dan Haseltine is well aware of the problem. "It's actually something we've thought a lot about. People think of Jars Of Clay as this band but nobody really knows what we look like, and nobody knows what our personalities are really like. It's like jumping into a really cold pool. Some people like to just dip their foot in first and then jump in. I think that's what we've been doing with our career. I think it's just taken us as a band a while to come to the place where we feel confident enough to say, look! OK, we're ready at this point for you to see more of who we are." We feel that we can handle the consequences of that a bit better."

In the aftermath of the 'Jars Of Clay' megahit, the band faced a number of controversies. There were some who were not happy with their mainstream success and their decision to play gigs in venues where alcohol was on sale. Even their tour with Sting came under scrutiny. Those criticisms obviously had an impact on the band. Dan explains, "It seemed like a bit of a backlash and so it made it really hard for us to feel like we wanted to show people our personalities, because we knew the criticism was gonna come, and we weren't sure we were ready to be able to handle that on a personal level.

"At this stage we're in a much better place, and feel like we're able to let our guard down a little bit and show people what Jars Of Clay are really like. The backlash wasn't easy at the time. First off because we were such a new band and really knew so little about the music industry anyway, and then on top of that there was the feeling that we were doing stuff that was wrong." He thinks back, "I think when you first get into doing music our tendencies are to want to please everybody. We were trying to do that and just failing miserably so that was really tough."

The result was that out of self-preservation, the band withdrew from public scrutiny. "I would say that we have hidden behind a barrier of anonymity to protect ourselves. But not anymore. I think the thing that we learned is that we really can't please everybody. We just have to be confident and know that we're doing what we're supposed to be doing and then if people don't understand, we can do our best to explain it but it stops there at that point."

Jars of Clay

The desire to allow more of their personality to come out on their new album influenced the approaches that Jars took to recording the project. Haseltine says, "In the beginning we sat down and said, 'What kind of a record do we want to make this time?' We listened to our two albums and said, 'We're not hearing as much of our personalities in this second album.' It was a conscious decision to say, 'I wanna hear Steve's personality when he plays a guitar, I wanna hear Matt's or when Charlie's playing keyboard, I wanna hear that.' The way Charlie plays is very much an extension of who he is and his style. Being able to interject these little swells with an organ right amidst the song and do it so gracefully. All those things we wanted to hear as far as personality goes. What that means is not creating a very sterile record. It means creating; record where you're gonna hear a lot of quirky stuff that other people would say 'We should pull this out of the record to make it sound very professional, clean and easy to listen to.' What we decided was, we wanted to create a record that didn't necessarily have to be so clean. Part of it was in reaction to 'Much Afraid' and part of it was just the idea that we really wanted to hear our personalities come out in the new album."

Ah yes, the 'Much Afraid' album! Perhaps a disappointment on two levels, it sold a million less copies that their first album and simultaneously seemed to lack the passion of their debut. Despite its quality, wasn't it a tad over-produced? "I would say yes! The 'Much Afraid' album was too clinical. I think we were very, very happy with the record but it was a very clean album. If you look at all three albums and you look at the first and the third, I think they have a little bit more continuity. 'Much Afraid' was this little detour where we got really clean. What we were trying to do was create a record very similar to say a Sting record, something like that. We accomplished it but I think at the same time we felt like our sound is not really supposed to be that clean."

Having sold three million albums prior to recording 'If I Left The Zoo', at one level the band could relax a little to create the album they wanted to record. Dan recalls, "The second record is where you feel a lot of tension to try to reproduce what happened with the success of the first and things like that. I think once we reached three million records, it was almost like we could breathe a little easier. We said, 'Ok, as a band we feel we've proven something, and our audience is still with us and they're giving us the go ahead to be a little more creative.' I think it was more of a breath of fresh air, and it gave us a chance on this album to just really experiment, and know that we at least have a fan base that's been very loyal to us. No matter how weird we'll get, some of them will probably stick with us, so they were giving us a good long leash to go down and try different things."

And there are some weird moments on the new album but was it a deliberate attempt at being quirky? Dan elaborates, "A lot of it was just in the recording process. One thing we learned about our producer Dennis Herring was that if you did something on the microphone, chances are it was gonna end up in the song and we didn't realize that for a good portion of the recording process. Whenever you put a microphone in front of somebody, they're gonna say some really dumb things or it's just gonna be really quirky or looney. We didn't realize he was gonna keep everything."

The realization came late in the development of the album and too late for Dan and the band to prevent some of their lunacy from making it onto the finished album. If ever the band's humorous personality is going to be heard, 'If I Left The Zoo' is the moment for it to be revealed musically. Dan explains, "The mix process for this record was done almost entirely without us because we had to go do concerts so Dennis was on his own. When we finally got to hear the songs in their finished form, we realized that all that stuff that we thought would end up getting cut out, the nuances, the ambient noise, the laughter and the talking was all still in there. It was unintentional but when I listen to it now, I think it really does capture the attitude of the way we were in the studio. There was so much laughter and a lot of joking so it's good that he kept it."

To illustrate the less-polished quirky, side of the band's latest recording, I asked Dan to explain the song "Goodbye, Goodnight" which is the opening cut of the album. Dan admits, "It is written from a strange perspective. I was watching the movie Titanic and I found some of the most interesting characters in the movie were the string players, the little quartet that had to stay and play while the ship is going down. 'Goodbye, Goodnight' is really a song about the end times, or coming to that place at the end of your life but from their perspective."

Jars of Clay

There's a '60s vibe on 'If I Left The Zoo' which might surprise fans because it gives the album more flavour than its polished predecessor. Dan shares, "We've all been listening to some classic rock and so we've probably been influenced by that on this album." Isn't there a danger that they might alienate the fans who bought the first two albums? "We might not sound like what we used to sound like, but we have to say, you wouldn't want us to just re-record the same sort of songs the same way all the time. Most of the time I've heard bands that try to emulate their style on the next record, it seems like almost a desperate cry to have people still like their music without being adventurous and moving out and expanding when their art expands. It is tempting to tread water, but it seems like culture is changing so quickly and styles of music change, so you almost have to be able to keep moving and reinvent yourself over and over again."

The success of Jars Of Clay seems like the triumph of a band who have had mega-success thrust upon them, rather than seeking to become one of the biggest bands in Christian music. Although they have successfully negotiated their way through the occasional London showcase and the rigours of mainstage Greenbelt, there are many who have caught them live who are unimpressed by their static live show. Yet the band keep selling albums not by virtue of an image, a knock 'em dead live set or a reputation for life-changing ministry. Instead their very ordinariness suggests that...shock horror...they sell on the strength of their music! In these days of the mega hype, marketing strategies and sales conferences, CCM fans actually just seem incapable of holding back from buying Jars Of Clay CDs.

Success, of course, brings a whole new set of challenges. Dan Haseltine himself has a reputation for being "The Quiet One" in the band and yet, when it comes to talking about some of the things the band have been through, he is honest when he considers how three million album sales have affected him. Specifically, I was curious to discover how pressure and success has altered or affected his relationship with God? "It's done great things just in terms of helping me deal with the level of success and of the things that really matter." He continues candidly, "There's definitely a time when you start really thinking you need all of the success, and you need the praise from people, and when it stops coming it creates a very real identity crisis."

That experience forced Dan to take a hard look at the reality of God in his life. "I asked myself, 'Who is Christ and who is he supposed to be in my life? What do I have because of what he did?' It was just a great wake up call to be able to come back to the cross. Again I realise that even amidst a bunch of praise from different people for the music, I'm still not able to do any of this without Jesus Christ. Without knowing that he's given me the ability to do these things. That's what it's really done, it's given me a chance to come back and strip away all those different things that have cluttered my mind and heart, that made me think that I needed all this other stuff. That I needed that kind of praise or needed to have these material possessions or reach that status, any of that. To come and see that Jesus Christ was the end all, not a place to start and say, 'I have Christ and now I need this and this and this,' but instead, 'I have Christ and that's really all I need.'"

The rooting of Dan's life into the heart of his faith has been a major factor in helping him to deal with some of the more unpleasant criticism that has been thrown at the band from some quarters. It seems that the American Christian music scene really struggles with artists who want to take their music into the mainstream. In the past, Jars have fallen into the jaws of this CCM Expectation Monster and been mauled by critics who are spiritually well-intentioned, but off-the-mark, when it comes to understanding the band's intentions and motivations. Like other artists, the Jars have had to deal with rumours about their spiritual health, vocal criticisms about the venues where they choose to play, the other artists who share the bill on mainstream gigs and a whole host of other areas where fans, critics and church leaders feel that the band are not "doing it right".

Dan is able to look back at some of those issues and be philosophical but surely, the response of some quarters of the Church must leave him a little cynical about Christianity? He responds, "There's a Christian sub-culture and I think some of my frustrations have been more with that Christian sub-culture than they have with Christianity. One of the things I've learned is that you don't look to Christians to find out whether or not you want Christ or whether or not Christ is who he says he is. You don't look to other Christians because what you're just gonna see is another person that is very willing and capable of failing at every turn. You really have to look at Christ. It's very easy for me to look at Christians and say, 'I'm just sick of this, sick of having to explain myself. I'm sick of the boxes that we put God and religion in.' Sometimes that will affect my ability to go and to seek Christ and feel like I have a viable relationship with him. It can be difficult, so you have to get to that point where you separate the two. Because Christ is who he says he is, I can extend grace to these people but I really don't have to like what they do.