![]() What’s interesting about our record deal and sort of commentary on the Christian music community is that before we signed our record deal…literally while I’m sitting at the desk, there is a photographer and all these people from the label standing around, and I say, “I need to make one more phone call.” I’m calling my lawyer while we’re all in the office to sign the contract for the deal and asking him a few things. We ended up having a good advocate almost immediately. I have an uncle that is a drummer and he introduced us to this lawyer, and it turns out it was a guy named Jim Zumwalt – who happens to be one of the most prominent entertainment lawyers in Nashville. So it was a bit of a process and it was kind of scary, but we had a lot of great people come around us early on. So we thought, “Well alright we’ll go there.” And then we had to get to know a new city and figure out how to navigate the music industry. We didn’t really know anybody in Nashville so we were just there because that’s where most of the labels we were talking to were based. ![]() ![]() Just that shock of, “Oh we’re uprooting already.” I think we were worried about that. When you’re going through a process like that as a sophomore in college, where is your head? Are you thinking these decisions can affect my whole future?ĭH: I was 20, and the oldest, thinking, “Wow, we’re starting our career.” I think what was hardest was that when you go to college you sort of expect that you’re going to be there for four years, you kind of get used to your community of people and friends. At the end of that school year we decided that we would go down for the summer and get jobs and hang out and meet some of the labels and see what happens. We put these instructions by the phone for everybody else that lived on the floor with us, basically saying, “If a record label calls, don’t say anything about this, or here’s what you can say, here’s what you can’t.” There was sort of a bidding war going on before we ever even got to Nashville. We had to write things down because it turned out there were about seven different labels that were interested in us. We lived in the basement of a dorm we called The Underground, and had only one pay phone. We started getting phone calls from record companies on our dorm floor. We went back to school after that to finish out the year. We wanted people to know we were writing from a Christian worldview, but we weren’t writing propaganda. We quickly learned how to play two of the songs, went to Nashville and ended up winning the competition. This was a little difficult for us was because we were in a studio recording class together, we weren’t really a band, we had never played the songs live, we only recorded them. Instead of getting a critique, we got a phone call from somebody saying we were one of the 10 finalists in this competition and they needed us to come to Nashville where we would have to play two songs. We just wanted to know from an industry professional if what we were doing seemed like it mattered or not, if it was good. ![]() You had to send fifty-bucks and three songs. We finished recording three songs and we saw there was a band competition where you sent in songs on a cassette tape and an industry professional would critique your material. Risen Magazine: You had to make some pretty big choices early in life… like quitting college, moving to Nashville, and becoming a band…what went into those decisions?ĭan Haseltine: We were taking studio-recording classes where we had to write songs and then got graded on recording them – actually most of the stuff on our first record was class projects for college (Greenville. Interviewed exclusively for Risen in San Juan Capistrano, California Risen was able to have a candid conversation with the lead singer of this multi-platinum, Grammy Award winning band, Dan Haseltine, about fighting perceptions, cultural shifts, and the lasting power of this beloved band. This story may sound like one only Hollywood could script as an inspirational feel-good film about following your dreams, but for Jars of Clay this was exactly the start of an exciting and challenging ride that has become an illustrious music career impacting millions of fans. As a result, a bidding war begins between more than a handful of record labels to sign them and once their first single makes its debut, it becomes the biggest mainstream hit ever by a band on a Christian label. Band Focuses on Creating Music with Honest, Truthful LyricsĪ group of college guys take a music class, they enter a band competition and win. ![]()
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