Jars Of Clay

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Jars Of Clay's Bio: An old Irish proverb, as translated: “It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.”

It is among our most basic of needs.

And like the other simple building blocks of life – air, food, water – it can take on many forms. It can be physical or spiritual, close-in or far-flung, untested or time-honored.

For the men that make up the creative force called Jars of Clay, this season has tested their perceptions, challenged their beliefs, underscored their experiences and opened up the possibilities for new definitions of this necessary component.

And now it’s time to share their vision of The Shelter.

“Cast off the robes you’re wearing, set aside the names that you’ve been given…”

Writing songs about community as an aspect of shelter wouldn’t seem like a revolutionary idea. Neither would recruiting talented friends, both long-time and brand new, into your working environment. But for Jars of Clay, long-known as a self-contained creative organism, opening up the doors to let new voices speak into the process wasn’t the easiest decision.

“Jars of Clay, historically, has been this kind of compact creative environment; we’re known for doing everything from the songwriting to the producing to the artwork,” says guitarist Matt Odmark. “This was a push in a totally different direction. We brought people in on the songwriting side of things, and we knew in the beginning that we wanted as many voices as possible in the record.

“We wanted to make a record about community, and we wanted the recording process to be community. We wanted it to be an expression of what it was trying to articulate from a concept standpoint,” Odmark continues. “It wasn’t going to work any other way, and it didn’t make sense to us to write a record about community that was just us talking to one another.”

So the call went out to the creative community Jars has long been part of, but hadn’t felt led to truly tap into previously. Songwriters they respect, like Laura Story, Thad Cockrell and Phillip LaRue, injected new lifeblood into songs that had been percolating for more than a year, and long-established, readily recognizable voices, like those of Mac Powell, Amy Grant, Brandon Heath, Leigh Nash, TobyMac and more, lent timbre and texture to this new set of Jars of Clay songs.

And yet, the motivation was there to make them more than just a set of Jars of Clay songs.

“We wanted the songs to sound like a group of people more than ‘there’s Toby, there’s Leigh, there’s Mac,’ so we brought in a choir,” says keyboardist Charlie Lowell. “Steve did a great job of rallying a bunch of independent musicians from around the Nashville area,” including Katie Herzig, Andy and Jill Gullahorn, Sarah Masen Dark, Julie Lee, Trent Dabbs and Kate York. … Read more