“I Need You” by Jars of Clay, Friday, March 31, 2023

Jars of Clay's funky third record, If I Left the Zoo, was produced by Dennis Herring, which took the band in a different direction than their previous two records. Herring had also produced This Desert Life by Counting Crows the same year as If I Left the Zoo, which influenced the direction of Jars of Clay's 1999 record. In the new millennium, Herring produced some of the biggest records for Modest Mouse, The Hives, Ben Folds, and Mutemath. 

YOU'RE ALL I'M LIVING FOR. Jars of Clay, however, wanted to return to their acoustic roots on their fourth album, The Eleventh Hour. The band had tried to work with Herring again, but the producer was unable to schedule sessions with the band. Thus Jars of Clay again self-produced their record like they did for their eponymous record. The lead single from The Eleventh Hour, "I Need You," was written during recording sessions for If I Left the Zoo, but fit better on the band's fourth record. The song sees Jars of Clay experimenting in electronics, something lead singer Dan Haseltine would try later with a solo project in the 2010s called The Hawk in Paris. With Haseltine's soft voice and the band's worshipful melody, "I Need You" more clearly to God than the "Jesus or girlfriend" ambiguous lyrics on the band's jabs at mainstream radio. Unlike the band's first three records, which earned them general market rock and pop radio singles and/or movie placements, The Eleventh Hour mostly impacted Christian radio markets. The single "Fly" proved that Jars of Clay on rock or pop radio was a thing of the '90s.  But this new marketing primarily to Christian outlets worked, and Jars of Clay won both a Grammy and a Dove Award for best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album and best Modern Rock Album, respectively. 

THERE'S A LIGHT FILLING THIS ROOM WHERE NONE WOULD FOLLOW BEFORE. A year after releasing The Eleventh Hour, Jars of Clay celebrated their tenth year as a band with a double disc set, furthermore: from the studio and from the stage. The record contained studio re-workings of some fan favorites and two B-sides from The Eleventh Hour. The live disc contained tracks recorded live on the band's Eleventh Hour Tour, one of which was the album's first hit "I Need You." The Eleventh Hour was the turning point in Jars of Clay's career, when they found that writing faith-based music for the general market was not a profitable venture. They realized they would never replicate the success of their 1995 hit "Flood." But the faith of Jars of Clay as a group of three out of four men who met at a Christian college and started making Christian radio hits is a bit more nuanced, which became clear with Dan Haseltine's Twitter controversy in 2014 when the singer defended same sex marriage. Other members have talked about their faith, doubt, and unbelief. And it's that story of complexity that brings me back to Jars of Clay's music even in the complexity of my own faith and doubt. It's still comforting to cry out to God when I feel sick and tired and remember a time when I dramatically could say "You're all I'm living for."

Read “I Need You” by Jars of Clay on Genius.

The Eleventh Hour version: