Jars of Clay
Christian Band Goes Light on Dogma for New Album

March 30, 2002 -- Make no mistake: Christian rockers Jars of Clay are still testifying. But to the uninitiated, many of the tunes on their latest album, The Eleventh Hour, could be taken for straight-ahead, modern-pop love songs. And while those songs address the complexities and subtleties of love with a maturity that belies the youth of these mid-20s musicians, their subject could be God or a girl.

Jars of Clay Photo: Kristen Barlowe

That's the idea, say the band members. On the new album, they avoided employing "the noisy vocabulary of religion," say the liner notes. The music is "because of faith rather than about it."

Over time, the band has become more "conscious of a dialogue with people who don't necessarily share our faith," lead vocalist Dan Haseltine tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon. On early albums -- such as the eponymous 1995 debut -- the band was more blunt in expressing religious convictions. They never proselytized, really, but it didn't take much work to see where they were coming from.

Jars of Clay, from their first and from their latest. • From the debut Jars of Clay "Liquid" "Art in Me" "Flood" • From The Eleventh Hour "I Need You" "Silence" "Scarlet"

Like many bands, maturity has given them the ability to come at their subjects from more oblique angles. "Art has a real chance to…make people feel what's true rather than telling them," says Haseltine.

Take the song "Scarlet" from the new album, which host Simon characterized as describing "the moment of maximum vulnerability when you realize you are in love."

"Love brings us to a dark place" agrees guitarist Matt Odmark. The question the song addresses is, whether "love (is) big enough to see us through that," he adds. All this is true whether the love in question is romantic love or the love of God. The songwriting here is "an intentional move to say, here's the common ground that we all walk around on," Odmark says.

There's a price to be paid for such ecumenism, of course. The saying goes that Christian music radio demands a minimum of "Jesuses Per Minute" (a play on "beats per minute"). Jars of Clay doesn't try to meet the quota. "A lot of Christians probably wish we had a greater agenda than we do," Haseltine says. But, "we don't need to prove the validity of what we believe."

Additional Resources

The Jars of Clay Web site

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