Jars of Clay:
Revolution in 'the eleventh hour'

“Peace takes a taxi to the underground.

I want to love the world but I don’t know how.

Blame it on the d.j. spinning all the fast songs —

ain’t playing anything that I can sing along.”

“Revolution,” Jars of Clay

By Frank "Buzz" Trexler
for The (Maryville, TN) Daily Times, Spring 2002

For a fortysomething, the song "Revolution" from Jars of Clay’s latest project harkens back to another era:

The Beatles, who penned their own "Revolution," changed the world their way. The clay jars that are Matt Odmark, Dan Haseltine, Charlie Lowell and Steve Mason are simply trying to do it another way.

The Jars’ movement goes back to the early 1990s, when Greenville College in Illinois was likely one of the few institutions of higher learning to offer a Contemporary Christian Music Department. As a result, a number of "school bands" carrying names such as Chrysalis, Jazon, Yellow #7 and Second Level sprung up on campus. And it was there that Lowell, Haseltine, Mason and Matt Bronlewee (who was later replaced by Odmark) began a journey of ministry and music that would become Jars of Clay.

Serving the poor was a part of Haseltine and Lowell’s life while in college; for example, combing the streets of St. Louis during the winter to cloak the homeless with blankets. Today, the Jars continue that tradition of service:

- Raising funds for African Leadership, a Christian education and development organization that serves 27 African countries.

- Traveling with Prayer for the Persecuted Church to China and Vietnam.

- Performing a free concert for Amnesty International during its 40^th anniversary and general meeting of Amnesty’s U.S. section.

"These are all things we do simply because of the gospel," Haseltine explains during a recent CCM magazine interview. "And it’s been great because it’s given us a heart that is beyond getting numbers of people to a show. …

"Some of the original intent of the church was to clothe the naked and to feed the poor and the hungry and to shelter the homeless," he says. "And those things have kind of fallen by the wayside as part of the purpose for the church. We feel that is so important because that is what’s actually speaking to this new generation — that their actual needs are being met."

With Jars of Clay, it has always been less a numbers game than finding ways to spread the message of the gospel beyond the Christian subculture. It’s a road less traveled, and one filled with barriers.

The band’s alternative sound hit the CCM market like fresh oil in 1995 and overflowed into the mainstream music scene. But it wasn’t an easy road, and sometimes it was a costly one: The music video "Flood" had to be reworked for mainstream video airplay — a costly endeavor for the band. Nonetheless, during its seven-year lifespan the band has managed to remain "in the world, but not of it."

"That’s been a continually challenging row for us to hoe," Odmark said. "Basically, I can just kind of boil it down to we really have a strong desire — a strong sense — that we need to be … getting our music into mainstream venues alongside what else is out there."

When the award-winning acoustic guitarist and vocalist called The Daily Times Wednesday morning from Nashville, Jars of Clay was in its "11th hour" before starting "The Eleventh Hour" tour. The band was in its last day of rehearsal before heading on a tour that takes in 50-plus cities in three months. The first show was Thursday at the hometown venue of Allen Arena in Nashville; the tour comes to Knoxville Coliseum 7:30 p.m. March 21.

Odmark believes the band holds it own artistically in the pop culture (a number of Grammys supports that belief), and the lyrics impart an important message that needs to be mixed in with all of the other voices the culture is throwing at listeners.

"So, for us it’s been a very kind of intentional desire that we’ve had to see our music continue to go into those places," Odmark says. "But, you know, it’s been sort of an uphill battle for us. We haven’t had the kind of easy road to success — in radio, especially — since the first record."

But radio is just one medium the Jars use to get their message into the culture. Haseltine co-composed music and produced the soundtrack for the film "Hometown Legend," and other Jars of Clay compositions have been featured in soundtracks from "The Long Kiss Goodnight," "Hard Rain," "Jack Frost," "The Chamber," and "The Prince of Egypt." The group's music has also been used in several television series, including "Providence" (NBC) and "One Life To Live" (ABC).

Most recently, the Jars wrote and recorded a song inspired by a story from the film "We Were Soldiers" entitled "The Widowing Field." The song was part of an acoustic set on the band’s first Pay-Per-View concert event on March 3.

The newest project, "The Eleventh Hour," is the band’s first album in almost two and a half years. Like the first self-titled album, it was self-written, self-designed and self-produced — but that was not the original plan.

The Jars had originally been slated to again work with Dennis Herring, who produced "If I Left The Zoo," and started songwriting in Mason’s studio. But scheduling conflicts sent them working solo.

"It was something we approached with fear and trepidation," he recalls. "We are very aware — because we had done the first record — of how relationally intense it is to produce it ourselves; of how much pressure that puts on the friendships that kind of make up the band. So, we didn’t want to just naively jump into that kind of relational pressure-cooker. We didn’t want to subject the band to something that, relationally, it wasn’t prepared to do.

"But the deeper we got into it, the more we really felt like this was the right direction to go. ... I don’t know that we could have gotten the same record any other way."

Perhaps not coincidentally, the result is a project that centers on relationships. Take the song "I Need You," which has already become the group’s 14^th No. 1 single:

"Relationship is used in this record as an invitation to connect listener to deeper issues of the heart," Odmark said, explaining that in any discussion you have to begin with a common ground.

"For us as artists, we feel very specifically that our job is not so much to explain the different tenants or theological points of religion, but it really is to sort of evoke the truth that’s inherently in issues of faith. So for us, it’s much more about making you feel what’s true than convincing you what’s true."

With "Eleventh Hour," the common ground of relationship is used to "propel someone to the gospel conclusion."

In this eleventh hour, that conclusion could spawn a new revolution.

The Rev. Frank "Buzz" Trexler is managing editor at The Daily Times and pastor of Green Meadow United Methodist Church, www.themeadow.org. You can e-mail him at PastorBuzz@nxs.net.