Matt Odmark of Jars of Clay (INTERVIEW)

Nobody likes being labeled, especially a band trying to make a name for themselves in the music world. And when your lyrics tend to sway towards the more positive with references to faith, hope and a higher power, being labeled a Christian band can sometimes make that journey a little harder. Although Jars Of Clay are not ashamed of the label, it has made it just a bit more difficult to be taken seriously in the regular rock & roll circles, where debauchery is de rigueur for most up & comers.

But Jars Of Clay has persevered for over twenty years, winning several Grammy awards and releasing their eleventh studio album, Inland, earlier this year. I had a chance to talk with guitar player Matt Odmark about the new album and how they made it sound fresh with songs such as “Loneliness & Alcohol,” “Fall Asleep” and the title track, what it’s like being pigeonholed as a band, and how working with multi-instrumentalist Adrian Belew gave them a boost of inspiration.

Matt, where did you grow up and what kind of kid were you?

I grew up in Rochester, New York, and lived there for the first twenty years of my life and it was a great place to grow up. I loved my hometown. I didn’t think I would ever leave, to be honest. It’s an amazing music town, home to the Eastman School Of Music, one of the world’s best music conservatories. So for being a small town, we were exposed to world-class musicians all the time. But I have always been an introvert, you know. I went to Catholic high school all the way through school and learned pretty quickly that sports wasn’t my thing, so I picked up on music and got in bands. I was a good kid all through high school. My parents were real active in the church so that was a big part of my growing up and I was just doing my best to be a good kid and loved music and then eventually music called me away from Rochester and I ended up in Nashville when I was about twenty years old.

Did you come from a musical family?

Yeah, my dad is very musical so probably my first memories of music are of him. He played guitar and sang, sang a lot in church and at parties and stuff, so those are probably some of my earliest memories. And because of that, my folks put me in piano lessons starting at five years old. So music was a part of my life from a very early age.

What did your parents say when you wanted to become a professional musician?

You know, even right at the very beginning, they have been very supportive. But I think they probably thought it was a phase, to be honest. I doubt they expected it to take on the shape that it did and last as long as it did. I think they were like, “Well, he’s twenty years old, what’s the harm if he does this for a couple of years. I’m sure he will be back in college and getting a respectable job soon enough.” That still may happen. We’ll see… (laughs)

When did you know you wanted to do this as something more than just playing in a weekend band?

I just love music and even though I was around world-class musicians, I knew I was more like a hobbyist. I definitely wasn’t like, I’m going to be playing concert piano with the London Symphony or anything like that even though those were the only people that had careers in music that I saw growing up. So I wasn’t really expecting it to be my job. I just expected it would be a part of my life, something I did in my spare time or did in my church or did wherever I could, you know. So I think when the opportunity came to join the other guys in the music they were making in the band, it was a little bit out of nowhere for me. I mean, I had played in bands in high school but you’re so conditioned that that’s going to be short term and not work out so I think I knew what the guys were doing was pretty special and I was really honored to be asked to be involved and so it seemed like something I couldn’t afford to say no to at the time. I’m really glad I did because it was definitely something I don’t know I would have come to any other way.

How did you meet them?

I grew up with Charlie Lowell, the keyboard player, and we had a little basement band in high school. We went to the same Catholic high school together. We were pretty close and then he went away to college and met the other two guys but I still kept in pretty close contact with him and was very aware of what he was up to musically. So that was kind of how we all met, within those first few years of college, and when they were deciding to put college on hold and move down to Nashville to see if they could get the band thing to go, that was when they invited me to join them.

Were you surprised when they asked you?

Yeah, I was actually. They were in a very small but very cool tight-knit community at the college where they were going outside of St Louis and knew tons of talented guitar players and musicians. So I was surprised that they needed to go outside of that community to find someone they thought would be a good fit for their band. So I was definitely surprised but again I knew this was something I should definitely do and ask questions later.

And here you are twenty years later, a Grammy-winning band. How did that feel being honored with those awards?

In lieu of having a degree, those things are nice to have, I suppose. The Grammy experiences have been really amazing for all of us. We definitely look at them as career highlights. They are a moment in time, they kind of come and they go and then you still have got to go to work the next day and get back to doing your work. But they are really, really nice and the Grammy folks work really hard to make that an evening that really honors the creativity that people put into their craft. So yeah, they were a very, very rich experience; even the ones where we went and didn’t bring one home. They were still a lot of fun.

Jars Of Clay is often labeled as Christian alternative with folk mixed in. Is that too pigeonholing for you?

That’s a great question. That’s a part of our story, a part of our background, like we’re from New York. It’s a part of who we are and that will always be a part of who we are. But I think in terms of what we’re trying to do artistically and musically, unfortunately that word sort of gets used as a means to narrow our music’s focus and our appeal to people, and I think we’ve always worked so hard our entire career to have as broad a conversation as we can with people that see the world differently than us. We’re constantly looking for whatever common threads that sort of tie us all together. And that’s very much the heart of everything we’ve done musically, whether it’s been our music or our non-profit work in Africa and that kind of stuff. I think it’s just something that means so many different things for so many people. You can use Christian to mean Martin Luther King or you can use it to mean Jerry Falwell. It’s such a divisive thing and it can be applied in so many different scenarios that it often sort of muddies the water of what our band’s about.

As far as most people are concerned, we’re a band that takes our work and our music very seriously, trying to do the best work we can and write the best songs we can. We just offer our perspective and over the years a lot of people have resonated with it and that’s meant a lot to us and kept us going. That’s really humbly kind of what we seek to do now.

Inland is your eleventh album. How did you make this one fresh and new and not the same old-same old?

That was really the elephant in the room when we went into the process, you know. I think there’re a lot of things that are great about being a band almost twenty years but then there are a lot of challenges that creep up. And one of those was, is there still the possibility for something great here or are we just kind of turning away? And I think that was the question that we really had to wrestle head on and it started first with us. Do we, the four of us individually, believe in this creative unit and it’s potential and believe there is something to say and something creatively to do? I think we had to sort of wrestle that one to the ground internally amongst the four of us.

But I think it was a real point of reflection for us and I think at the end of the day, the four of us were able to look each other in the eye and kind of go, we see it, we know it, we believe it, it’s in here; so if we’re going to make another record, let’s make every decision under that sort of pretense that something truly special is possible. Let’s not work with anybody that doesn’t also think so, and that was kind of how we started our course on this project. There’s a lot of people that were working with us that no longer do because it became clear relatively early on that they were interested in something else other than what we were trying to do. Then we had to bring new team members into the process that heard the music and were resonating with it and believing that it was worth the effort that it was going to take to put it out in this particular climate.

So it was a slow process of kind of gathering team members that also believed the same way. A big part of that was that we decided who to work with as far as the producer that we worked with, Tucker Martine, and wanting to make the record in Portland. We decided we were going to take some very strategic partnerships to open us up to some new possibilities that we hadn’t explored. I think that’s really the metaphor of the record, of the title Inland. It’s about that point in The Odyssey when he has lived the majority of his life, he’s had all these adventures on the sea, he’s finally come home and he’s back with his family at home and the oracle comes to him again and says, “It’s time to head inland and it’s time to go so far inland that you meet someone that doesn’t know what the ocean is.”

So it’s really that question of, is there a second adventure for us in life. I think that’s the other piece of this record, this process. Most of us have seen all the exciting and important things happen in the first twenty years of our life and then there’s not a lot of understanding about what happens with the rest of it and I think that was what we were kind of wrestling with, certainly as a band. People expect you to be around three or four years, if you’re lucky. So what do you do with a band that’s been around for four times that? Is there room to consider that that band’s same power can make great and important music, which is not what usually happens? So that really became the overarching metaphor for the record we were trying to make and why the record was called Inland and why the songs took the shape they did.

Which one of the new songs excited you the most personally when you were recording it?

For me the most, the writing process was really fun and was really different in a lot of ways. Many times we just kind of write until we feel like we have enough. We write maybe fourteen or fifteen songs and then usually we feel like, oh we’ve got some really good ones in here and we’ve got a couple that we think are getting good, so we jump in the studio and go. On this record we spent about a year writing and we wrote forty or fifty songs and it kind of allowed you to get lost in it a little bit and sort of forget what you were writing for to the point where we were just kind of showing up and writing whatever song that day required and worrying less and less about a record or whether they were good enough and what they were saying.

One of our most fun experiences in the process was that a few of us collaborated with an old friend, Nathan Barlowe, and when we wrote a song it was the title track that day. We wrote three or four different tunes that day and “Inland” was the one that we ended up with on the record but that song, from the first day we recorded it, was one I was really excited about. I worked hard to make sure the lyrics got finished on that one, personally, and I had a lot invested in that song and was glad it ended up on the record.

What can you tell us about “Loneliness & Alcohol?”

That’s a really good one too. That was certainly another one, when we were writing it, that was a real turning point in the writing process. One of the things that changed in our writing process was we always kind of write like jamming first as a band with some sort of musical idea and then something comes out of that and it eventually turns into a song. And one of the cool things that happened is that Dan [Haseltine, lead singer] kind of usually sits there with a laptop and sings melodies over whatever we’re jamming. And part of this record he sat down behind the drums and we gave him a little microphone so he wasn’t really able to think about words so much. He had to sort of like play the drums and sing at the same time. And that was one of the first songs that we wrote and it wasn’t like any other melody I’d ever heard him do before. He kind of mumbled those words, “loneliness and alcohol” and I said, “Did you just say loneliness and alcohol? That’s crazy.” So for a long time we knew that was the name of the song but we didn’t have any other words (laughs). That’s certainly a favorite to play live.

You’ve been in this band a long time, going on twenty years. What do you think when you read some of Dan’s lyrics? Do they still surprise you by what he’s writing about or that they’re coming from him?

(laughs) Yeah, absolutely. I’m always surprised how vulnerable he’s willing to be in his lyrics. And that’s not to say that every song that he’s written is autobiographical; in fact, probably a lot of them aren’t. But I would also say that the stuff that he writes you can’t write unless you feel it in some way. That might not be your story but there’s some part of your story that’s close enough to that in order to write it like that. I’m always sort of surprised how starkly honest he’s willing to be and I think he’s a brilliant lyricist, someone that I’ve loved to work with over the years.

What was it like working with Adrian Belew again?

Adrian is an old and dear friend and it was really fun for us to reconnect with him. It’s been probably a few years since we had last seen him and we got together and had dinner with he and his wife and reconnected. I was really personally impacted by Adrian. I mean, here’s a guy that’s twenty years our senior as far as living a life in music and he has accomplished so much. So many people respect his body of work and yet he was just as stimulated and creative in thinking about new ideas and new projects as anybody I’d ever met. Probably more so than most young musicians. It’s just great to be around him and see him be so excited about new ideas and new projects and new things that he was working on. That was really fun and his willing to participate on our project was big.

I understand you studied English Literature. What is your favorite book and why?

Great question. Going back to those days, I definitely loved The Grapes Of Wrath by Steinbeck. Steinbeck and probably Willa Cather’s My Antonia, those were the first pieces of literature I ever read as a young person and was just mesmerized by what they were able to do with those projects. But those are favorites of mine. I’ve also been a longtime fan of a Montana-based author, David James Duncan. He’s written just a few novels but they’re amongst my very favorites. One’s called The River Why. It’s sort of a coming of age story and he’s also written another one called The Brothers K, which is sort of a modern retelling of the Brothers Karamazov, with the overlay of rural Oregon life. Those are just great.

Do you think true literature is being lost in today’s society because people want something quick?

Things are certainly changing and I think it’s really hard for us to fully appreciate how they’re changing. They’re probably changing more radically than we even realize but then other things are. Like these technological advances, they’re difficult for us to process cause they change everything and it takes us decades to really fully appreciate the full weight of what these changes mean for us as communities. But I’m not an alarmist so I don’t generally tend to believe that just because e-books have been invented that that means nobody will read.

I even sort of see it in the recorded music business. Like, the internet has certainly radically changed the way people listen to music right now. But in some ways it’s a return to the way they first started to listen to music in the forties and fifties. Then in sort of the fringes are these resurgences of people, like the record shops popping up everywhere and people buying old records and now they want to have record players, you know what I’m saying. With every sort of new transition there’s always this weird sort of backlash. But I guess I do feel like the part of literature that touches us as human beings, and I don’t know exactly how it’s going to work out, but I’m a strong enough believer in the core contours of what humanity is and how we live that those things aren’t going to change. I don’t believe technology is going to change [everything]. You know, the greatest parts of literature that has been a testament to our humanity will somehow find a new way to continue to unfold.

But at the same time I do realize that the majority of people that used to sit on airplanes and read books now hold Ipads. And the majority of people who like serious literature have always been a small, small amount of people. I remember reading Walker Percy’s biography and he was like, if you’re going to write serious literature, you’ve got to realize that at your most wildly successful moment, you’re probably talking less than 100,000 people in the world. And that was him talking in the fifties and sixties.

We are on the road a bunch for the rest of the year and into next year. So if you’ve ever loved Jars Of Clay or ever even heard of us, please come out to the shows. They’ve been a lot of fun and we’ve had some amazing opening bands. The new record really is a must experience in the live format. It really takes on the full picture so we’re going to be doing that a lot. We have some Christmas shows in December as well and we’re going to continue that into the new year. We have some video projects we’re working on and we’re going to take Inland as far as we can and hopefully that means we’ll be coming to a city near you.