Multi-platinum and triple Grammy winning band Jars of Clay have long held a reputation for creative excellence. With their 2006 record Good Monsters , the band continues to create music that stretches the imagination and offers a new perspective on who we are as a church today. Dan Haseltine explains, "I was not sure how all of the experiences of the last few years would translate into music. There have been so many things to look at and describe. This record is part confessional, part euphoric love poem, part bitter divorce, and part benediction. It was born out of many experiences and conversations between addicts, failures, lovers, loners, believers, and beggars. And so the language of recovery and the honest discourse about our attempts to live apart from God and apart from each other is a theme. Engaging people who are doing the hard work of laying their lives open to others, and avoiding isolation, has allowed me to see that there is both immeasurable evil and unfathomable good mixing under my own skin and it is grace, mercy and freedom that allow me to not simply be a monster, but to be a good monster." With eleven original songs, and a remake of the Julie Miller-penned anthem All My Tears, Good Monsters even boasts a couple of stirring guest appearances: Nashville-based, Americana singer/songwriter extraordinaire Kate York guests on Even Angels Cry, and formerly of Sixpence None the Richer, Leigh Nash, sings on Mirrors and Smoke. -Provident
