Jars World : Miscellaneous : Interviews
Interviews
October 13th, Concert • updated 12.15.03 • Jiggity Jars
The JarsWorld staff had a chance to catch up with Jars of Clay after their awesome show at Paramount’s King’s Island near Cincinnati, Ohio on October 13th, 2001. We met up with the guys backstage by their tour bus to chat. Standing near the tour buses is not always the best idea in the world right after a show when all of the bands are trying to leave (as we found out first-hand)! We tried to focus the questions on the new album and what the Jars guys have been up to within the last year or so. We chatted with all of the guys for a little while, and then after the tour bus incident we talked one-on-one with Matt. Hope you enjoy this look into what your favorite band has been up to lately!
I wanted to ask you if you rode any roller coasters today?
Dan: Just the plane ride here, actually, was rather turbulent.
Charlie: It was bumpy, couple of loop-de-loops.
Steve: Oh man, that was like the perpetual turbulence for an hour and a half.
Dan: It was pretty serious. And we were watching Tomb Raider on the little screen, and the whole plane is going like…
It was an effect, right?
All: Yeah.
Steve: It was like the virtual reality deal.
We rode one of those simulator rides today, pretty wild. Rotating chair and all that stuff.
Steve: Recipe for illness, that's for sure.
I want to talk about the new record a little bit. [Everyone I talked to at the show] who has heard it told me, "It's great, it's awesome." [I was told that] you recorded about 30 tracks.
Steve: Cool! Yeah, we did 30 songs, demo type things, whittled it down, and then wrote a couple more when we picked the best. It's called "The Eleventh Hour", and it's funny that I think probably some of our favorite songs we wrote in "The Eleventh Hour" of the record. Like when…
Charlie: [We] thought it was over.
Steve: But we'd only just "begun" (sung as a line from the Carpenters song "We've Only Just Begun").
I hope that's not on there! (laughs)
Matt: Oh no!
Steve: It's a hidden track, it's hidden away.
Matt: Very, very hidden away, like you'll never find it.
Steve: You know Tomb Raider? It's in one of those caves.
I think it's kind of interesting how your album you named probably a little while ago "The Eleventh Hour," and then [with] all of the stuff happening these days… I don't know what to say about if this is the eleventh hour, but, who knows.
Steve: We wrote a song that won't make it on the record called "America" that basically surmises where we felt like America was in terms of our heroes, and being maybe disillusioned with the idea of role-models and if there is truly anything to believe in now that we so much about everybody from Presidents to our favorite actors. I thought it was very timely, and then now that we're into October, almost a month after…
Dan: That means nothing. (laughs)
Steve: That's definitely a snapshot of where we were, but it's neat to see that we haven't really… I don't think America finds itself there anymore, and that's good.
Yeah, things have really turned around. I guess I'm not surprised given the magnitude of the events.
Steve: Yeah, it's sad that it takes that to bring such a change.
Have you guys felt safe and everything on your touring? You guys are flying a lot, right?
Charlie: We've been flying.
Steve: The thought always crosses your mind.
Charlie: I've felt ok flying.
Matt: I don't feel super safe. I'd rather be in a bus than in an airplane.
Steve: Yeah, but in general, we'd just rather be in a bus.(laughs)
You'd probably rather be home more than anything else.
Dan: Yes.
Matt: Definitely rather be home.
Charlie: [It’s] a little hard being in L.A.
Steve: I'd rather fall off a ladder and die, you know?
Did you guys have any songwriting retreats this time? I know [previously] you went to Decorah, you went to Oxford…
Charlie: It was kind of a like a four-month songwriting retreat in Steve's basement.
Steve: Yeah, we just kind of meet, and make up a song. At five o'clock, stop and go home. We worked a real strict 9-to-5, we'd come in, write something in the morning, track it through the day. It was an interesting way to work.
Matt: Slightly different than the last two in that we kind of wrote everything in the studio. We didn't really do much writing off in the…
Charlie: Camp.
Matt: …woods, in the nature, with the acoustic guitars and the harmonicas.
Steve: And the wind and bark and harmonicas.
Matt: It was all written in the studio which was neat. It gives the record a different… the songwriting a different flavor.
So more collaboration this time maybe?
Matt: I suppose…
Charlie: Yeah, I'd say more band…
Steve: In a strange way, yeah, but in another way, yeah…
Matt: This record, every single song was like a four-way collaboration. It wasn't like there was anything we had written with other people, or just two of us with somebody else, which we've done before, which is cool.
Like [working with] Mark Hudson and Greg Wells.
Matt: Yeah, like those things. Strangely enough, this record has none of that. So that makes it different I guess.
And you self-produced?
Dan: Yeah, this is the first record that had to have the explicit lyrics sticker on it. (laughs)
[On another topic,] I was listening closely to “Collide” the other day, and I heard a car horn in there near the end!
Steve: You heard the car horn in "Collide"? That's brilliant. We literally pulled it up to the studio there in Oxford and just (makes car horn noise) laid on the horn. Actually, I conducted and Charlie played it. It was brilliant.
Dan: What you need to do, you need to flip around the first verse of "Flood."
Flip it around… you mean, play it backwards?
Dan: Play it backwards.
Uh oh, I don't know! (laughs) Does it say, "Paul is dead"?
Steve: Oh yeah, yeah.
Dan: There's a rhythm in there from another song that's fairly prominent that you might recognize.
Steve: Oh, and it's backwards?
Matt: Backwards, yep.
I want to talk a little bit about your live show, since I just saw one.
Dan: Oh man, we want to talk about that too. We need to talk about that.
Nobody seems to talk about that in interviews. You guys never get any credit for all of the work you put into reinventing your songs, and cover tunes, and…
Charlie: Just the sheer enjoyment that we feel.
Matt: Natural worth.
Steve: No it is, honestly, to see people going "I think I know this song… I know these lyrics… What is this? Oh, it's 'Like a Child.'"
Dan: “Oh, it's ‘Like a Child?’ I hate this!”
Steve: "I hate this! Why don't they play songs I like?"
I liked "Revolution", great track. I couldn't pick out all of the lyrics, but they sounded really interesting.
Steve: Cool! It's really playful…
Dan: That's why the explicit lyrics sticker is on it.
Steve: Yeah, it's like "Louie, Louie", everybody thinks it's something bad and raunchy. But it's actually just kind of, "blah, blah, blah… Visa bucks."
It sounded really great.
All: Thanks.
And I do appreciate how you guys have redone [your songs live]. One that I really appreciated in particular was "Liquid", when you guys went back and did it real goth, and [Steve] had the slide guitar solo, and [Charlie] had crazy keyboard effects going on and all that.
Dan: That was… Oh no, that was "Frail" I was thinking of that had Luke's theme.
Steve: Oh yeah, yeah, Princess Leia…
Do you guys just practice that stuff, or do you go in the studio and actually remake?
Steve: Not really.
Dan: Starts in a rehearsal hall, and then it just sort of evolves on stage.
Steve: And some of it happens accidentally during the show. Sometimes.
Charlie: "Worlds Apart" is sort of evolving now a little bit.
Steve: Yeah, it's turning into something else.
Like the popcorn effects, those kind of happen… (Editors note: At the concert earlier in the day, one of the concession sellers was joking around with Steve. Steve asked for some popcorn, and the guy threw a bag on the stage for Steve.)
Steve: Yeah, that was spontaneous tonight. I just ordered a couple bags of popcorn…
Matt: Now… every night!
Dan: We knew we didn't have confetti cannons and all that stuff, we just had to do something you know.
Steve: So I put it on my amp and I was hoping it would warm and then more kernels…
Sometimes it probably feels like a microwave on stage.
Dan: [Put] some baskets of Jiffy Pop out there.
Steve: That would be brilliant actually, a little pot...
Matt: A little what? (laughs) (Editors note to the kids at home: Don’t take Steve’s comment out-of-context like Matt did :-))
Steve: Actually, just a stove.
Dan: We'll just put it on one of the lights.
I think that was the longest "Worlds Apart" I've heard you guys ever play. Is that accurate?
Matt: Yeah, that was pretty long, it was great!
Dan: It gets long, it's changing a little.
Matt: It's been fun.
Charlie: We let it go, just to kind of feel it. And sometimes you don't feel it for like 10 minutes…
So what about the cover tunes? No cover tunes? Are you going to bring back the cover tunes, some new ones?
Steve: Not recently. Maybe we'll do something, we always seem to…
Matt: The more records you have, the less room in the set you have for cover tunes. You realize you have to cut out songs you probably should play in order to play some.
Steve: Or want to even play!
Matt: Or ones you would rather play, yeah.
Steve: You know we gotta do Bob Seger again, because Charlie loves Bob Seger.
I thought you guys did some great cover tunes. Badfinger, Beach Boys, good stuff…
Matt: Oh yeah, we have fun doing those.
Dan: Yeah, we enjoy going over the classics.
(All of a sudden we see a huge tour bus beside us trying to maneuver around the Jars of Clay tour bus. All of the guys go over to try and let the other bus driver know that he’s about to take the mirror off of the side of Jars’ bus. The other bus “Collides” with Jars’ bus (at maybe one mile-per-hour speed), and the mirror looks like it’s going to fly off. The mirror ends up just bending a little, and it looks like the damage is fairly minor. Dan, Steve, and Charlie try to help straighten things out, and Matt stays back to talk with us some more).
Wow, the glamour of being on the road. These are the behind-the-scenes, sort of like the “Almost Famous”…
Matt: You almost saw like two bands go to fist fight right here. "You hit our bus, oh yeah, come on…"
So I noticed you brought out the electric a few times again, that's pretty cool. Nice angled guitar and everything.
Matt: Yeah, just a few times. It's neat, it's a fun guitar, fun to play on. Still tweaking that out, it's definitely not my comfort zone, but it keeps things exciting.
I saw that you won a [Gibson] guitar award. Congratulations on that.
Matt: Yeah, that was really wild. I was very honored.
The nominees were like Bob Dylan, and, I mean, was Richie Sambora in there? I don't remember who else, but there were some heavy hitters.
Matt: It was nuts. It was wild. I don't know how I got lumped in with that, but for some reason I did, that was really cool. Very big honor.
And you guys were at the Grammy's too, right? You just took some time off to pile up all your awards this year, right?
Matt: Seems to be, I guess. (laughs)
Did you get to hang out with anybody at the Grammy's? I saw that picture of Radiohead with you guys.
Matt: Yeah, our Grammy was right after theirs, so we kind of stood in line behind them for all the press stuff. The guitar awards were neat cause I got to hang out with a bunch of cool people. Dave Grohl was there, he won an award, Melissa Auf Der Maur was there, she won an award, Emmylou Harris won one, Peter Frampton got one. So I got to hang with a lot of neat people at that. That was really fun. I didn't know what that was going to be like, so I was pretty shocked about what an honor it was.
I wanted to ask you in particular about a track that you did [a while ago] called "Jesse's Song"?
Matt: Oh yeah.
Now I haven't heard it, because I don't think it ever came out. Can you talk about that?
Matt: It's supposed to be coming up on a… You know those Taylor Guitar's Wood and Steel projects that they do, have you seen that?
Oh yeah, "Wicker Baskets"…
Matt: It's supposed to be Volume 3 of that. It hasn't… For some reason, they pulled the whole project together but then they stalled on releasing it. So I don't know why it hasn't come out yet, but it’ll come out eventually. We did that, me and Steve and Charlie did that for that project.
Oh ok, so it wasn't just you, I heard somewhere that it was just you.
Matt: No, it was something I wrote that Steve and Charlie kind of helped me flesh out a little bit. So, that was it.
Well you guys have so many songs it seems like that pile up that come out on different projects… You had your White Elephant Sessions… You know, you have so many tracks!
Matt: We're really not that prolific a band. It sounds like we are, but, because of the way we write… This new record's only going to have 11 songs on it, so by comparison that's not very many… [A] lot of people are putting like 18 or 19 song albums out. But we've tried to get in the habit of just writing a lot more because those little things come along. They want you to do something for it, and you're like "oh, ok, we've got to write something. Quick, be inspired!" So we try and at least have some backlog of ideas so we have some place to go in those moments. It's been good, it works best for us that way.
Well, you'll have a great box set someday.
Matt: I hope, here's hoping.
So do you think the band is becoming more electric and less acoustic? I mean, obviously on stage, more of a rock show type of…
Matt: [On] stage, it leans that way just because it seems like it does. This album I guess is kind of leaning a little more rock in a sense. We tried real hard to pull out a lot of acoustic elements on it. So I know how I think about it in my head, but I'm kind of waiting to hear how other people… how it hits them. Because you can think like, oh yeah, we made this really a kind of acoustic record, and people listen to [it] and they'll be like, man, that's totally like rock. It's just really funny how your perception of it is kind of different.
I don't think you guys have "gone electric", or "gone acoustic", I think you just evolved as a band. That's what it sounds like to me.
Matt: Yeah, we tried to do that. This new record, we were pretty intentional about trying to take the last three and sort of synthesize them together, you know? Kind of pull aspects from each one. We weren't necessarily looking to invent a whole new direction. We were more wanting something that pulled a thread through the last three records.
That's interesting.
Matt: To me, that's how the record strikes me. It has songs that I think pull… have nods to the first record. There are a couple of songs that maybe even kind of nod to the second record a little bit. There's definitely reminiscence of the third record in it too. I'll be interested to hear how it hits other people, because we've spent so much time theorizing and going after certain things and so you don't really know if you've succeeded until what you've been trying to communicate all along is actually being communicated.
Do you have a favorite out of all the new ones? I know it's really early, but is there one that you really are proud of already that you feel really good about?
Matt: (thinks for a while) I have different favorites for different reasons, you know? There's one song on there called "These Ordinary Days" which is my favorite in one sense cause it's very unproduced and unrehearsed. It's just real simple, there's a couple guitar tracks, Dan sang it once or twice, and it's just very honest and very raw, but very beautiful. That's neat, we really like that song. A song called "Silence" which has some of the moody, questioning, longing aspects of a song like "Worlds Apart" and/or "Frail." [It] kind of has a little bit of that… There's a song called "Fly" which has a mass rock appeal which is neat, but just has a really cool, powerful chorus. I think we really captured something special there. There's a couple of quirkier numbers that have neat little musical finessed moments that I'm really proud of. Lots of little moments that I'm proud of on the record. Because we produced it ourselves we're so much more in the middle of every song. We have so much invested in each song along the way it's not like somebody did it all and it kind of happened and now we're able to look back and go, "Oh, well, I love the way that turned out." We really worked on each song until we were very satisfied with where it was at.
Was that kind of like your first album, because you guys produced your first album…
Matt: Similar to our first-album in that sense, yeah. Definitely.
I remember one time Dan said that you'd never try to self-produce an album again because you'd break up the band. And I see you guys all standing on stage, you know, bowing… (laughs)
Matt: It's definitely the harder way to do it, and for us it was a long, sort of weird road to get us to this point again. We had a few doors close early on in the album and we didn't know what we were going to do. We talked to a couple of people that wanted to produce, and just didn't really feel right about anybody necessarily. The more we just thought about it we were like, let's at least kind of get started in the process working on it ourselves. We knew we had lots of songwriting to do, so we were like, let's do the songwriting in the studio and let's see how that works, let's see how that process develops. And if we feel like we can find something that's including and inspiring us all, maybe it will make sense to self-produce. So it just kind of developed that way. So it seemed to work really well, we're very satisfied with the results. It was very much us.
Do you think that made the band even stronger to come back together and self-produce instead of weakening?
Matt: Definitely. Every album either pulls the band further apart or jams them closer together. The creative process has to do one of those two things, it's really hard to remain indifferent. [We] chose the self-producing route, which we knew would drive us towards each other, in an uncomfortable way. As opposed to having a producer that can kind of be the scapegoat, you know what I mean? They can kind of be the middle guy…
Make the hard decisions…
Matt: Yeah, [someone] that would make the hard decisions, that would have to deal with all the personal frustrations with different things. We knew not having a producer we had to solve all that stuff ourselves. And that's a lot of, for us especially, it's a lot of relational stuff that is involved in that, that has to be worked out within the band before that could really work. So it was difficult. We knew going into it, we're like, this is going to be harder, there's so much more to worry about and so much more to think about in doing this. But we feel like it worked out really well, and I could see us doing it again. I don't know that we'll do it again next record, maybe we will, but it was a good enough experience that I'm sure we will do it again.
Well, I'm really looking forward to the new record, all of us are. From what you guys have told me, it’s just going to make us even more impatient. I just want to hear it now! But, we'll wait until March.
Matt: Good, good.
Hey, thanks Matt, thanks for answering all those questions and everything.
Matt: No problem, great to meet you guys.
You can pick up Jars of Clay's new album, "The Eleventh Hour", on March 5th, 2002. Many thanks from the JarsWorld to Rendy Lovelady Management and the Jars for making this interview possible.
Click here for some pictures the JarsWorld staff took at the show.
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I wanted to ask you if you rode any roller coasters today?
Dan: Just the plane ride here, actually, was rather turbulent.
Charlie: It was bumpy, couple of loop-de-loops.
Steve: Oh man, that was like the perpetual turbulence for an hour and a half.
Dan: It was pretty serious. And we were watching Tomb Raider on the little screen, and the whole plane is going like…
It was an effect, right?
All: Yeah.
Steve: It was like the virtual reality deal.
We rode one of those simulator rides today, pretty wild. Rotating chair and all that stuff.
Steve: Recipe for illness, that's for sure.
I want to talk about the new record a little bit. [Everyone I talked to at the show] who has heard it told me, "It's great, it's awesome." [I was told that] you recorded about 30 tracks.
Steve: Cool! Yeah, we did 30 songs, demo type things, whittled it down, and then wrote a couple more when we picked the best. It's called "The Eleventh Hour", and it's funny that I think probably some of our favorite songs we wrote in "The Eleventh Hour" of the record. Like when…
Charlie: [We] thought it was over.
Steve: But we'd only just "begun" (sung as a line from the Carpenters song "We've Only Just Begun").
I hope that's not on there! (laughs)
Matt: Oh no!
Steve: It's a hidden track, it's hidden away.
Matt: Very, very hidden away, like you'll never find it.
Steve: You know Tomb Raider? It's in one of those caves.
I think it's kind of interesting how your album you named probably a little while ago "The Eleventh Hour," and then [with] all of the stuff happening these days… I don't know what to say about if this is the eleventh hour, but, who knows.
Steve: We wrote a song that won't make it on the record called "America" that basically surmises where we felt like America was in terms of our heroes, and being maybe disillusioned with the idea of role-models and if there is truly anything to believe in now that we so much about everybody from Presidents to our favorite actors. I thought it was very timely, and then now that we're into October, almost a month after…
Dan: That means nothing. (laughs)
Steve: That's definitely a snapshot of where we were, but it's neat to see that we haven't really… I don't think America finds itself there anymore, and that's good.
Yeah, things have really turned around. I guess I'm not surprised given the magnitude of the events.
Steve: Yeah, it's sad that it takes that to bring such a change.
Have you guys felt safe and everything on your touring? You guys are flying a lot, right?
Charlie: We've been flying.
Steve: The thought always crosses your mind.
Charlie: I've felt ok flying.
Matt: I don't feel super safe. I'd rather be in a bus than in an airplane.
Steve: Yeah, but in general, we'd just rather be in a bus.(laughs)
You'd probably rather be home more than anything else.
Dan: Yes.
Matt: Definitely rather be home.
Charlie: [It’s] a little hard being in L.A.
Steve: I'd rather fall off a ladder and die, you know?
Did you guys have any songwriting retreats this time? I know [previously] you went to Decorah, you went to Oxford…
Charlie: It was kind of a like a four-month songwriting retreat in Steve's basement.
Steve: Yeah, we just kind of meet, and make up a song. At five o'clock, stop and go home. We worked a real strict 9-to-5, we'd come in, write something in the morning, track it through the day. It was an interesting way to work.
Matt: Slightly different than the last two in that we kind of wrote everything in the studio. We didn't really do much writing off in the…
Charlie: Camp.
Matt: …woods, in the nature, with the acoustic guitars and the harmonicas.
Steve: And the wind and bark and harmonicas.
Matt: It was all written in the studio which was neat. It gives the record a different… the songwriting a different flavor.
So more collaboration this time maybe?
Matt: I suppose…
Charlie: Yeah, I'd say more band…
Steve: In a strange way, yeah, but in another way, yeah…
Matt: This record, every single song was like a four-way collaboration. It wasn't like there was anything we had written with other people, or just two of us with somebody else, which we've done before, which is cool.
Like [working with] Mark Hudson and Greg Wells.
Matt: Yeah, like those things. Strangely enough, this record has none of that. So that makes it different I guess.
And you self-produced?
Dan: Yeah, this is the first record that had to have the explicit lyrics sticker on it. (laughs)
[On another topic,] I was listening closely to “Collide” the other day, and I heard a car horn in there near the end!
Steve: You heard the car horn in "Collide"? That's brilliant. We literally pulled it up to the studio there in Oxford and just (makes car horn noise) laid on the horn. Actually, I conducted and Charlie played it. It was brilliant.
Dan: What you need to do, you need to flip around the first verse of "Flood."
Flip it around… you mean, play it backwards?
Dan: Play it backwards.
Uh oh, I don't know! (laughs) Does it say, "Paul is dead"?
Steve: Oh yeah, yeah.
Dan: There's a rhythm in there from another song that's fairly prominent that you might recognize.
Steve: Oh, and it's backwards?
Matt: Backwards, yep.
I want to talk a little bit about your live show, since I just saw one.
Dan: Oh man, we want to talk about that too. We need to talk about that.
Nobody seems to talk about that in interviews. You guys never get any credit for all of the work you put into reinventing your songs, and cover tunes, and…
Charlie: Just the sheer enjoyment that we feel.
Matt: Natural worth.
Steve: No it is, honestly, to see people going "I think I know this song… I know these lyrics… What is this? Oh, it's 'Like a Child.'"
Dan: “Oh, it's ‘Like a Child?’ I hate this!”
Steve: "I hate this! Why don't they play songs I like?"
I liked "Revolution", great track. I couldn't pick out all of the lyrics, but they sounded really interesting.
Steve: Cool! It's really playful…
Dan: That's why the explicit lyrics sticker is on it.
Steve: Yeah, it's like "Louie, Louie", everybody thinks it's something bad and raunchy. But it's actually just kind of, "blah, blah, blah… Visa bucks."
It sounded really great.
All: Thanks.
And I do appreciate how you guys have redone [your songs live]. One that I really appreciated in particular was "Liquid", when you guys went back and did it real goth, and [Steve] had the slide guitar solo, and [Charlie] had crazy keyboard effects going on and all that.
Dan: That was… Oh no, that was "Frail" I was thinking of that had Luke's theme.
Steve: Oh yeah, yeah, Princess Leia…
Do you guys just practice that stuff, or do you go in the studio and actually remake?
Steve: Not really.
Dan: Starts in a rehearsal hall, and then it just sort of evolves on stage.
Steve: And some of it happens accidentally during the show. Sometimes.
Charlie: "Worlds Apart" is sort of evolving now a little bit.
Steve: Yeah, it's turning into something else.
Like the popcorn effects, those kind of happen… (Editors note: At the concert earlier in the day, one of the concession sellers was joking around with Steve. Steve asked for some popcorn, and the guy threw a bag on the stage for Steve.)
Steve: Yeah, that was spontaneous tonight. I just ordered a couple bags of popcorn…
Matt: Now… every night!
Dan: We knew we didn't have confetti cannons and all that stuff, we just had to do something you know.
Steve: So I put it on my amp and I was hoping it would warm and then more kernels…
Sometimes it probably feels like a microwave on stage.
Dan: [Put] some baskets of Jiffy Pop out there.
Steve: That would be brilliant actually, a little pot...
Matt: A little what? (laughs) (Editors note to the kids at home: Don’t take Steve’s comment out-of-context like Matt did :-))
Steve: Actually, just a stove.
Dan: We'll just put it on one of the lights.
I think that was the longest "Worlds Apart" I've heard you guys ever play. Is that accurate?
Matt: Yeah, that was pretty long, it was great!
Dan: It gets long, it's changing a little.
Matt: It's been fun.
Charlie: We let it go, just to kind of feel it. And sometimes you don't feel it for like 10 minutes…
So what about the cover tunes? No cover tunes? Are you going to bring back the cover tunes, some new ones?
Steve: Not recently. Maybe we'll do something, we always seem to…
Matt: The more records you have, the less room in the set you have for cover tunes. You realize you have to cut out songs you probably should play in order to play some.
Steve: Or want to even play!
Matt: Or ones you would rather play, yeah.
Steve: You know we gotta do Bob Seger again, because Charlie loves Bob Seger.
I thought you guys did some great cover tunes. Badfinger, Beach Boys, good stuff…
Matt: Oh yeah, we have fun doing those.
Dan: Yeah, we enjoy going over the classics.
(All of a sudden we see a huge tour bus beside us trying to maneuver around the Jars of Clay tour bus. All of the guys go over to try and let the other bus driver know that he’s about to take the mirror off of the side of Jars’ bus. The other bus “Collides” with Jars’ bus (at maybe one mile-per-hour speed), and the mirror looks like it’s going to fly off. The mirror ends up just bending a little, and it looks like the damage is fairly minor. Dan, Steve, and Charlie try to help straighten things out, and Matt stays back to talk with us some more).
Wow, the glamour of being on the road. These are the behind-the-scenes, sort of like the “Almost Famous”…
Matt: You almost saw like two bands go to fist fight right here. "You hit our bus, oh yeah, come on…"
So I noticed you brought out the electric a few times again, that's pretty cool. Nice angled guitar and everything.
Matt: Yeah, just a few times. It's neat, it's a fun guitar, fun to play on. Still tweaking that out, it's definitely not my comfort zone, but it keeps things exciting.
I saw that you won a [Gibson] guitar award. Congratulations on that.
Matt: Yeah, that was really wild. I was very honored.
The nominees were like Bob Dylan, and, I mean, was Richie Sambora in there? I don't remember who else, but there were some heavy hitters.
Matt: It was nuts. It was wild. I don't know how I got lumped in with that, but for some reason I did, that was really cool. Very big honor.
And you guys were at the Grammy's too, right? You just took some time off to pile up all your awards this year, right?
Matt: Seems to be, I guess. (laughs)
Did you get to hang out with anybody at the Grammy's? I saw that picture of Radiohead with you guys.
Matt: Yeah, our Grammy was right after theirs, so we kind of stood in line behind them for all the press stuff. The guitar awards were neat cause I got to hang out with a bunch of cool people. Dave Grohl was there, he won an award, Melissa Auf Der Maur was there, she won an award, Emmylou Harris won one, Peter Frampton got one. So I got to hang with a lot of neat people at that. That was really fun. I didn't know what that was going to be like, so I was pretty shocked about what an honor it was.
I wanted to ask you in particular about a track that you did [a while ago] called "Jesse's Song"?
Matt: Oh yeah.
Now I haven't heard it, because I don't think it ever came out. Can you talk about that?
Matt: It's supposed to be coming up on a… You know those Taylor Guitar's Wood and Steel projects that they do, have you seen that?
Oh yeah, "Wicker Baskets"…
Matt: It's supposed to be Volume 3 of that. It hasn't… For some reason, they pulled the whole project together but then they stalled on releasing it. So I don't know why it hasn't come out yet, but it’ll come out eventually. We did that, me and Steve and Charlie did that for that project.
Oh ok, so it wasn't just you, I heard somewhere that it was just you.
Matt: No, it was something I wrote that Steve and Charlie kind of helped me flesh out a little bit. So, that was it.
Well you guys have so many songs it seems like that pile up that come out on different projects… You had your White Elephant Sessions… You know, you have so many tracks!
Matt: We're really not that prolific a band. It sounds like we are, but, because of the way we write… This new record's only going to have 11 songs on it, so by comparison that's not very many… [A] lot of people are putting like 18 or 19 song albums out. But we've tried to get in the habit of just writing a lot more because those little things come along. They want you to do something for it, and you're like "oh, ok, we've got to write something. Quick, be inspired!" So we try and at least have some backlog of ideas so we have some place to go in those moments. It's been good, it works best for us that way.
Well, you'll have a great box set someday.
Matt: I hope, here's hoping.
So do you think the band is becoming more electric and less acoustic? I mean, obviously on stage, more of a rock show type of…
Matt: [On] stage, it leans that way just because it seems like it does. This album I guess is kind of leaning a little more rock in a sense. We tried real hard to pull out a lot of acoustic elements on it. So I know how I think about it in my head, but I'm kind of waiting to hear how other people… how it hits them. Because you can think like, oh yeah, we made this really a kind of acoustic record, and people listen to [it] and they'll be like, man, that's totally like rock. It's just really funny how your perception of it is kind of different.
I don't think you guys have "gone electric", or "gone acoustic", I think you just evolved as a band. That's what it sounds like to me.
Matt: Yeah, we tried to do that. This new record, we were pretty intentional about trying to take the last three and sort of synthesize them together, you know? Kind of pull aspects from each one. We weren't necessarily looking to invent a whole new direction. We were more wanting something that pulled a thread through the last three records.
That's interesting.
Matt: To me, that's how the record strikes me. It has songs that I think pull… have nods to the first record. There are a couple of songs that maybe even kind of nod to the second record a little bit. There's definitely reminiscence of the third record in it too. I'll be interested to hear how it hits other people, because we've spent so much time theorizing and going after certain things and so you don't really know if you've succeeded until what you've been trying to communicate all along is actually being communicated.
Do you have a favorite out of all the new ones? I know it's really early, but is there one that you really are proud of already that you feel really good about?
Matt: (thinks for a while) I have different favorites for different reasons, you know? There's one song on there called "These Ordinary Days" which is my favorite in one sense cause it's very unproduced and unrehearsed. It's just real simple, there's a couple guitar tracks, Dan sang it once or twice, and it's just very honest and very raw, but very beautiful. That's neat, we really like that song. A song called "Silence" which has some of the moody, questioning, longing aspects of a song like "Worlds Apart" and/or "Frail." [It] kind of has a little bit of that… There's a song called "Fly" which has a mass rock appeal which is neat, but just has a really cool, powerful chorus. I think we really captured something special there. There's a couple of quirkier numbers that have neat little musical finessed moments that I'm really proud of. Lots of little moments that I'm proud of on the record. Because we produced it ourselves we're so much more in the middle of every song. We have so much invested in each song along the way it's not like somebody did it all and it kind of happened and now we're able to look back and go, "Oh, well, I love the way that turned out." We really worked on each song until we were very satisfied with where it was at.
Was that kind of like your first album, because you guys produced your first album…
Matt: Similar to our first-album in that sense, yeah. Definitely.
I remember one time Dan said that you'd never try to self-produce an album again because you'd break up the band. And I see you guys all standing on stage, you know, bowing… (laughs)
Matt: It's definitely the harder way to do it, and for us it was a long, sort of weird road to get us to this point again. We had a few doors close early on in the album and we didn't know what we were going to do. We talked to a couple of people that wanted to produce, and just didn't really feel right about anybody necessarily. The more we just thought about it we were like, let's at least kind of get started in the process working on it ourselves. We knew we had lots of songwriting to do, so we were like, let's do the songwriting in the studio and let's see how that works, let's see how that process develops. And if we feel like we can find something that's including and inspiring us all, maybe it will make sense to self-produce. So it just kind of developed that way. So it seemed to work really well, we're very satisfied with the results. It was very much us.
Do you think that made the band even stronger to come back together and self-produce instead of weakening?
Matt: Definitely. Every album either pulls the band further apart or jams them closer together. The creative process has to do one of those two things, it's really hard to remain indifferent. [We] chose the self-producing route, which we knew would drive us towards each other, in an uncomfortable way. As opposed to having a producer that can kind of be the scapegoat, you know what I mean? They can kind of be the middle guy…
Make the hard decisions…
Matt: Yeah, [someone] that would make the hard decisions, that would have to deal with all the personal frustrations with different things. We knew not having a producer we had to solve all that stuff ourselves. And that's a lot of, for us especially, it's a lot of relational stuff that is involved in that, that has to be worked out within the band before that could really work. So it was difficult. We knew going into it, we're like, this is going to be harder, there's so much more to worry about and so much more to think about in doing this. But we feel like it worked out really well, and I could see us doing it again. I don't know that we'll do it again next record, maybe we will, but it was a good enough experience that I'm sure we will do it again.
Well, I'm really looking forward to the new record, all of us are. From what you guys have told me, it’s just going to make us even more impatient. I just want to hear it now! But, we'll wait until March.
Matt: Good, good.
Hey, thanks Matt, thanks for answering all those questions and everything.
Matt: No problem, great to meet you guys.
You can pick up Jars of Clay's new album, "The Eleventh Hour", on March 5th, 2002. Many thanks from the JarsWorld to Rendy Lovelady Management and the Jars for making this interview possible.
Click here for some pictures the JarsWorld staff took at the show.
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