Jars of Clay's Dan Haseltine hasn't been lost in the flood

Dan Haseltine, left, says that he and his fellow members of Jars of Clay weren't initially happy about being defined as a "Christian" rock act. "What we came to realize was (fans) really wanted some ownership in what we were doing. They want to think that you believe what they believe and you're on their side and you care about the things you care about. That's what every fan wants."

For years it seems that Jars of Clay have walked between two worlds.

"We were all kids who grew up in the church, so we all came from a Christian background, but our musical influences weren't in Christian music at all," says Jars of Clay voalist Dan Haseltine. "Our musical expressions weren't faith-based. It was all just music to us. We had never created any dividing lines. When we were beginning there were these two markets — mainstream music and Christian music. We didn't want that separation. We didn't think it existed. So we made a record and chose (rock artist) Adrian Belew as a producer. ... We felt it was best to blur as many lines as we could."

In fact, the band did just that. With the Jars of Clay's 1995 song "Flood," the group landed on mainstream and college rock radio charts while they were opening for contemporary Christian star Michael W. Smith.

"We'd open for him, grab all our gear and get into a van and drive into a city and play the seedy bar or the club for a rock radio station on the same night."

But living in both worlds, the group members were constantly having to explain themselves to both sides of their audience as well as programmers and DJs at rock radio stations.

"We got enough hate mail from people who thought we were either too Christian or not Christian enough," says Haseltine. "And when you're college students just trying to figure life out, we had no language to describe it to people. We had no ability to have an honest discussion and say, 'This is why we're doing it.' It just became this big battle and we just decided, 'We're not going to fight it anymore. Let's just make music.'"

Haseltine's first important musical influence was certainly not from the gospel side of music. Haseltine says he was 6 or 7, hanging out in the garage with his older brother when he heard Queen's "Bicycle Race."

"That was the first song I really connected with," he says. "It was about a guy who just wanted to ride his bike and that's all I wanted to do!"

From that point on, Haseltine would sit for hours listening to the radio.

As an early teen, Haseltine was into the music of the time — Def Leppard and hair metal groups, but his tastes expanded quickly.

"The pivotal turning point was while I was going out to see all those hair metal bands and going out to see Rush play, a friend handed me a cassette tape of Depeche Mode's 'Black Celebration' and that sort changed my whole view on music. I kind of stepped into synth music. So my first band when I got to my freshman year in high school was four keyboard players and we were doing all New Wave music."

He says the rest of the members of Jars of Clay had similar experiences, which is one of the reasons the group's albums have been so different stylistically from each other — they've all been influenced by different types of music.

Haseltine says that even though the group is on a tour geared toward Christian audiences, a religious message isn't the band's goal:

"Even if people see us inside the Christian world we see ourselves outside of it. We don't carry that same agenda. Faith is a part of our lives, but we write about it more from the questions that we have. You'll never hear an answer in a Jars of Clay song. That's just the way we work."

© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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