With two platinum albums behind them, the stakes are high as Jars of Clay heads in a new direction. "I think there's always that pressure to want to do as well," Jars of Clay leader Dan Haseltine says. "We want people to hear our music, and we want to be able to have the mission field in the mainstream."

The foursome-Dan, Charlie Lowell, Matt Odmark and Steve Mason-watched its 1995 self-titled debut erupt into multi-platinum sales after the song "Flood" became a mainstream hit and an MTV video. The next album, Much Afraid, was certified platinum earlier this year. But people familiar with those projects may be surprised by the new one.

If I Left the Zoo turned out to be an opportunity for Jars of Clay to experiment with new musical styles and flavor. It was produced by Dennis Herring, (The Innocence Mission, Counting Crows), who used a no-holds-barred approach in pressing the guys into new territory. "He's great in his ability to push us beyond what we normally would do." Dan says. "We wrote 15 to 20 songs for the record and went to him and he said, 'OK, these are really good. Now I want you to go away and write as if you weren't Jars of Clay.' That forced us to write in other genres and in ways we wouldn't normally do, and it opened the door to a bit more of a style change. So it's Jars of Clay, but it has elements of a lot of other things."

"We wanted to make a concerted effort to do something a little different and kind of experimental," Matt adds.

"What I tried to do," Herring says, "was keep them off-balance as much as I could, especially early in the process, so they'd be forced out of their patterns. We all have modes we get into in working, and sometimes if you can help people stay out of those early on, it's a good way to get to the new stuff."

That was hard on the band. "Normally we'd set up live in the studio and hammer through the songs," Charlie says. "We would know the format and what we were gonna do, and we would do it well and that would be it. But Dennis had us, especially with a few songs, go on for like a week playing them maybe 12 different ways. Maybe change the drums, get a different guitar part, play the piano instead of the organ. He just sort of mangled a few of the songs, at it was really hard for us because at points they sounded terrible and we lost any excitement about them. There were weeks or even a month or two where it was like, 'Man, I don't know if I'm excited about the album right now.' But it always came around for each song. Dennis just has a gift for finding each song's most interesting form and somehow realizing it.

"Dennis really targeted Steve, and it was hard for Steve at times," Charlie continues. "I mean, he had him play weird things-like 'Grace' has some really bizarre guitar stuff in it-and for a while Steve was like, 'I would never play this. He's got me playing things I would never play.' But eventually they got it to where Steve got really excited."

The most extreme changes were to "Can't Erase It." "Dennis saw a lot of potential in the song but I think it kind of bored him," Charlie says. "He said it sounded like the Gin Blossoms and reminded him of all these other rock bands, and he wanted to make it more than that. We love the version now, but it's almost a new song. But I think it's more interesting and has a lot more quirky energy than it would have had if we'd let it take on its first form."

With all the difficulty creating If I Left the Zoo, would the guys go through it again in the future? "We would," Charlie chuckles. "It's hard to want that again, but we're so excited about what it did to the record. We've all said we would use Dennis again in a heartbeat, just because of the metamorphosis he took the songs through and how much stronger they are now."

The album was recorded in the relaxed atmosphere of Herring's studio in Oxford, Miss., a college town with an artistic vibe. This setting, Matt says, "helped the process of the record. It definitely flavored it a bit."

At one point Herring and Steve Mason took a couple of days off and roamed town together. "It was great," Herring says. "We spent half of the day going to pawn shops and just checking out old instruments. Steve bought these old Kay guitars-the most expensive one was $100-and those were used on the record quite a bit, as were some percussion instruments he found."

"The album has a lot of the pop approach," Dan says. "It still has a lot of the token Jars things that we like to do-a lot of the acoustic ballads are still there; there's a song called 'River Constantine' [a song about the Holy Spirit] that's very much in the genre of 'Worlds Apart.' There's always a common thread of what Jars of Clay is in each song, but we've taken little risks and detours here and there."

"I think the record sounds fairly eclectic," Matt says. "It's still very acoustic-driven, but it's much more organic and feels very American."

The new sound isn't the only thing that's changing about Jars. "I think we've really gained a fresh perspective on our purpose as a band," Dan says, "because we've been very sure that our mission was really outside of the church, just in terms of being able to build relationships with the mainstream radio stations and going into clubs and playing in the bars and doing stuff where we really have a mission field.

"I think what we've tried to create is an album that doesn't use many of the typical Christian metaphors. We tried to write it in the hope that non-Christians will listen to this record and will be able to understand things we're talking about and will be able to relate to certain topics. Some people might listen to it and think 'This isn't really a Christian album, simply based on the fact the metaphors and allusions they're used to aren't there. But it is a very Christian record and it's very much based in truth."

The guys are finding their best ministry opportunities are coming out of the relationships they have with people they come in contact with every day. "When we go into a club or a bar, usually it's the club people who are working there that you spend most of the day with before the crowd arrives," Dan says. "Those are the people you get to minister to, because you get to hang out with them and they see how you are behind the spotlight. They get to see you when you're not out there performing and trying to put a best foot forward. Sometimes we're talking to people that are very hesitant to talk to Christians because they feel like they're judgmental, or they've got this or that hang-up against Christianity. Hopefully what we do is break down those walls."

Allen Weed, president of Interlinc, an organization that provides a connection between youth leaders and Christian music, explains it this way: "These are guys who grew up in the church but all of a sudden were playing in clubs, and they struggled with it and asked God, 'Why is this happening? Do You want us to do this?' Through prayer and counsel, that's what they now feel is their ministry. These guys are out there softening up the soil a little bit so the seed can be sown in areas it doesn't normally go. It's easy for people in the church to understand when somebody does praise & worship; it's far more difficult for a person who doesn't know these guys to understand a calling to go into these places and be pre-evangelistic. They do what Jesus did with the parables-He talked about the things of God in a way that intrigues people, and the people that were really hungry to know asked the questions."

"I have a sense of God's hand in this record, and I really believe He has written and given us a record that is truly good," Matt says, "I feel a tremendous sense of excitement to see where it takes us, because I really think it's the best record we've made. I think God's going to give us a lot of neat opportunities to do this music and I'm eager to experience them all."*

*Article transcribed from Release Magazine, December 1999/January 2000, pages 32-34.