Jars of Clay's Matt Odmark (left), Dan Haseltine, Steve Mason, and Charlie Lowell reach a new level of honesty in the songwriting behind their new album.

We're all aware of the evil that lurks within; the apostle Paul called himself a "prisoner of sin." But most of us are pretty good at hiding that stuff and putting on a smile—especially at church. Dan Haseltine, frontman for the Grammy-winning band Jars of Clay, played that game for a long time too. But when he met some guys who were committed to being totally honest with each other, he decided he was sick of hiding the monster within—a good monster, but a monster nonetheless. Thus the title of the band's new album, Good Monsters, releasing next week—and thus the premise for this conversation with the always thoughtful and articulate Haseltine, who speaks his mind on his own internal monsters, on his doubts, on the rise of honesty in Christian music, and on the things that make him say, "Oh, my God."

I hear this album was basically recorded the old-fashioned way, by getting the whole band in the studio and playing the songs in one shot.

Dan Haseltine: Yeah, we actually did preproduction on this record, which is something we never do. We wrote the songs ahead of time, spent some time rehearsing together, and then went in. We literally went song by song and collected full performances of each one.

Did you say to yourselves, "Man, why haven't we done this all along?"

Haseltine: I don't know that we could have done it before. The light bulb went on when we were making Redemption Songs; that's when I think we really felt like we were capable of sitting down and making a record that way. The process of making this album was just such a fantastic experience, I imagine this is how we will do it from here on out.

The theme of Good Monsters reminds me of Romans 7, where Paul says, "I do the things I don't want to do, and I don't do the things I know I should do." Is it any way inspired by that passage?

Haseltine: Not directly, but certainly the sentiment of that passage. It's the whole idea of coming to grips with the fact that we are capable of incredible evil and also incredible good, and that those things both exist, usually in equal parts, underneath our skin. We tend to hide the bad stuff, but we feel like the gospel calls us to bring the full weight of who we are—both sides—into our relationships, vocations, the things we do, and the way we work with other people.

Anything in particular prompt your desire to explore this?

Haseltine: I had recently encountered this thing called the Samson Society. It's a group of guys who get together and get a lot of stuff off their chests, the kinds of things that make us think that if somebody knew this about us, they would run the other way. What I found is that guys are sharing this kind of stuff, and it's making people love them more. That's a vulnerable place.

The gospel never calls us to live our lives privately, but the idea of individualism and isolation has worked itself into our idea of what a good Christian life looks like—that it's full of quiet times where it's just us and God. But for me, when I get into that scenario, the only voice I'm really hearing is my own. And when I'm trying to wrestle with some truth of the gospel or some new element God is trying to teach me, it's just me using my own knowledge base rather than living that out in community with other people. So it never really works. The kind of maturity that I hope for, the kinds of things I want to have freedom from, they never come, because it's just me working it out by myself.

And so, all that kind of came together, and we thought, Well, this is how we want to write this record. I want to be as open in the lyrics of this album as I am in this group of guys. And hopefully that would stir other people to do the same thing.

Is this something the whole band is doing?

Haseltine: We've been a band for 13 years, and last year we kind of hit this pivotal point where we said, "We don't really know each other. We're not really helping each other live out the bigger struggles. We all have this stuff we're dealing with, and it doesn't even seem safe to talk to each other about it." I think that was the point where we all recognized that something had to happen. It's something that every member of the band has taken steps to try to change, to try to find better community. It looks different for each of us, but everyone's involved, and it's changing the dynamic of the band and our relationships.

The press kit for Good Monsters includes a quote from you that the album "was born out of many experiences and conversations between addicts, failures, lovers, loners, believers, and beggars." Do all of those words describe Jars of Clay?

Haseltine: Uh, sure! (Laughter) They definitely describe myself. But it's enlightening when you sit down with somebody who isn't full-on into this mode of self-protection, and they're willing to give you a picture of their heart, because it reveals so much more of my own heart. I see it in someone else and I go, "Oh wow, I deal with that too!"

Can you give me an example of something you've told the other guys that you've been struggling with?

Haseltine: Sure. Being out on the road affords a certain level of isolation. When we first started, I was kind of the businessman for the band, the liaison between us and the record labels. So I kind of made up this persona that the reason I wasn't having good relationships or hanging out with people was because I was handling all the business stuff. It became sort of this victim mentality. But it also became this great excuse to not be known, to not let people into my world. And in that, I'd be able to do what I wanted to do. If I was in a hotel room by myself, and I wanted to watch a movie, I could do it, because there was nobody else around.

I assume you mean you've made some poor choices in that regard?

Haseltine: Yes. The truth is that if I wanted to engage in anything—utilizing the mini-bar to its fullest potential, watching a trashy movie, looking at Internet porn, etc.—there was no one stopping me.I become almost primal in the way temptations, that don't wield any power over my conscience in normal daily routines, flood in when I am stuck in some hotel room in some city. There's no one to remind me that the things I think I'm entitled to in that moment are things that are part of the problem, things that only ever create a wider chasm between me and the healthy relationships I need. Alcohol, sex, drugs, and even celebrity are all things that medicate.They dull the symptoms of a life spent listening to only one voice—the one in my own head.And that voice is a critical, loathing, and confused one most of the time. I am my own worst pop music station, constantly telling myself what I want to hear—and coming up with creative ways to do it.

So what have you done to combat that?

Haseltine: After a while, my confession to the band was, "Guys, I've created this world that I haven't let you into for ten years. You know very little of who I am, very little of how I think, very little about my motives." And that was the beginning of just saying, "OK, let me help you dissect this monster that I am, because it matters to me that you know who I really am, not the guy that I've been presenting to you." That's been huge.

How hard was it to take that first step?

Haseltine: Well, it's taken me ten years, so it's been something almost unthinkable for a long time. But now that I'm around people who are in the habit of doing that, it wasn't that hard. I recognized how freeing it was. A friend told me, "You are not chronically unique in your story. The things that you do wrong, the way you are broken, is similar to so many other stories."

The press kit also quotes you as saying, "The language of recovery and honest discourse about our attempts to live apart from God and apart from each other is a theme in the album." When you say "living apart from God," what do you mean?

Haseltine: Sometimes it was me with full conviction running the other way, and at other times, it was just simply not knowing where I was. Every day it probably runs that gamut of the choices that I make. I think a lot of that is also part of the discipline of saying, "OK, this is the gospel, but am I living my life as if I actually believe that?" Most of the time, I'm not. I don't make choices that are really based off of that. I make choices that are based on the things that I think I need or who I think I am, not actually who the Bible says that I am.

It's part of the process. You have to know the truth to be able to hold something up against it, and find out where it lines up and where it doesn't. I think that's where every day I either have to choose to know the truth—or be able to hear the truth from somebody. So, when I talk about living apart from God, I think it's really just living outside of the real ramifications of what the gospel should mean in my life.

We've talked to some artists recently who are saying, "I decided to be totally honest on this record." Part of me wants to say, "What the heck took you so long?" Has Christian music been dishonest all along? Is all of this honesty really something new? Could it be a response to the sometimes superficial lyrics of the "worship movement"?

Haseltine: Good questions. I don't know. I guess certain artists like Sara Groves or Carolyn Arends or we in Jars, we're just growing up. A lot of these artists are maturing. It's a season of life where we're going, "What are we going to write?" We have a choice. We either write songs that are kind of detached and ironic, or we become more honest. Because the middle ground is just so uninspiring—to write songs that try to explain this way of looking at the world that's partly a lie. It's not exciting, and it doesn't have any good ripple effects in the world or in the culture. I think there's room for honesty now.

And yes, I think the worship movement did play a part in it. So many of these worship songs are, "I'm gonna do this for God, I'm gonna be this, I come to you with my whole heart," and people are going, "Gosh, that's not me. I don't do that. I come to church to get filled up. It's about me. I'm not going there to serve God or to worship God." And maybe for the first time, when people are kind of forced to sing these songs over and over in their churches, they're going, "This doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel honest. How do I break out of this?" So I think that that is probably part of it.

Maybe that triggered what we had in 2005, the Year of the Hymns Album, and now in 2006, the Year of the Honest Album.

Haseltine: Well, hymns are fairly honest too, and that's part of it—moving away from some of the praise choruses and into the hymns, where you are hearing songs about the greatness of God and the depravity of man. And I think that's where we are right now.

Let's talk about one new song, "Oh My God." Where'd the idea come from?

Haseltine: Matt [Odmark, Jars guitaris] came to the band with this idea to use the phrase "Oh my God" in a song. It means so many different things and it's used in so many different contexts, but in the end, it means that at some point in every person's life, they have to confront whether or not God is real.

In the song, you express some of your own doubts. The press kit says that as a guy who grew up in church, you never felt like you had permission to ask whether God is real. What has happened in your life to cause you to ask that question now?

Haseltine: It's strange. The things that make me doubt God at times are really kind of mundane things. Like McDonald's.

Huh? Not AIDS in Africa or human suffering, but McDonald's?

Haseltine: No, it's not the suffering. It's the stuff that makes me go, "So this is the way the story played out. That God would have some guy named Ray Kroc start a hamburger restaurant called McDonald's." It's the way our world is structured, this idea of capitalism and the lottery, that make me go, "Is this all of man, or is this God?" Those things play a weird role in the story of mankind of working out his salvation and his place in the world. And those are the kind of things that cause me to kind of have these little crisis moments.

But it's the big things too. We just spent some time in Rwanda, and real violence makes me ask those questions too—the all-out violence of man to man. We visited this church in Rwanda where they'd set up a memorial to what happened in the genocide in '94, where 800,000 people were killed in less than a hundred days. Five thousand people died in this one church, and they'd left the bodies there; now it's just bones.

Gary Haugen from International Justice Mission was with us. He was the head of the UN investigation into the genocide, and he had actually visited this church in '94 and had to go through the bodies and do the forensics of the situation. He was describing the way people would get up in the morning, and they'd kill, kill, kill, then stop, have lunch, go back, kill some more, and then have dinner. Very systematic. It began as these quick killings, and then it turned into something more primitive as the restraints came further off. It began to be torture and humiliation and mutilation. It takes a long time to kill 5,000 people in a church. Think about being in there with your family as these murders get closer and closer, and to hear the screams.

I'm sure those people weren't praying, "God, please help me have a better car, or please increase my land." It was, "God, please stop the hand of our aggressor," and it didn't happen. That prayer wasn't answered for anybody in that church. And this wasn't the military doing this violence; it was their neighbors. That kind of stuff really sent me into a spiral: "What is going on? How does this fit in?" It does two things. It causes a bit of a crisis of faith, and at the same time, it also makes me realize there has to be a God, because my own sense of justice does not have a context for this. Only God's greater story of redemption can fit something like this into it, for 800,000 people to die, you know? God promises that there is redemption, so where is it? You know, it's a lot of those kind of questions. And those are all wrapped up in that song.

Haseltine and Jars have been to Africa several times, and are planning a return trip early in 2007—much of it as part of the Blood:Water Mission project they started several years ago. We talked at length with Haseltine about Africa and Blood:Water, but we'll save that portion of the interview for a later time.

Click here to visit our artist page for Jars of Clay and read more about the band. Visit Christianbook.com to listen to sound clips and buy their upcoming album Good Monsters.

© Mark Moring, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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