During their March 2001 Greenville College visit, Jars of Clay sat down with Jessica Ford, senior Marketing major at GC, and Robyn Florian, college Internet Communications manager, for the following interview:

Jessica: Talk a little bit about why you're here this week and what you hope accomplish as you work with students.

Dan: (Smiling) We're trying to discourage them from actually getting into music ... ever. Helping them find something else to do.

Matt: We're mainly here on Warren's invitation. We've been talking to Warren a lot lately about our relationship to the school and the school's relationship to us. He really encouraged us that if we had time, and we did have a little bit of freedom in our schedule right now, it would be great to come up and meet some of the new faculty and hear some of the bands on campus (which we did last night).

Jessica: Where do you see your relationship with Greenville going, especially with Pettit leaving?

Steve: I think that's part of why we're here. It's been really good to meet some of the new faculty in the Music Department. Actually I was surprised to hear that certain people were no longer here, like the distinguished Dr. Wilson. It's been cool to meet the new faculty so that we can hopefully continue with some kind of relationship because, honestly, Warren was the reason that we got together from a mentor facilitator standpoint.

He really was supportive and encouraged us. At the time there weren't a lot of bands on campus - though now it's become pretty commonplace. I think we were one of two on campus. We owe a lot to Warren and we're glad to sit down and do a seminar and talk with students and just shed some light from what we've learned in the last five years.

Dan: I think the other side of it is that because of our affiliation with Greenville, we've had a lot of students come up to us at concerts and say, "Hey look, I think I want to go to Greenville College. What do you think?" Because a lot of things are different in the music program now, we haven't really been in a place to say "Yea, I think you should check it out," because we didn't know.

This has been a great opportunity to meet the new faculty, as Steve said, and see how the music program is doing, how it's growing, and then be able to say, "yea, we'd encourage you to go" or "no, run as fast away as you can." (No, we wouldn't say that…) We'll be able to give more of an educated opinion as to whether they should check it out or not.

Steve: We're totally blown away at the facilities and the way it's grown. And the talent - the bar has really been raised here. There are freshmen coming in who sound better than a lot of what was going on at senior recitals five years ago. The opportunities are ridiculous. We're all encouraged just in this brief time we've been here.

Jessica: I'm curious as to what you think of Pettit's new venture. Do you plan on being involved with that at all? Do you think it will have any effect on the industry?

Dan: We hope so. We like Martha's Vineyard! That's where James Taylor lives.

Steve: I hope it's a huge success and that it fosters a creative atmosphere that brings with it freedom and grace that you can understand all the more what it looks like to make great art that reflects what we believe. I think Warren is a great facilitator and encourager in that aspect of life. I'm sure he's going to be really successful in it.

Charlie: We hope to continue some sort of relationship with Warren just because he's been so involved and instrumental in what we're doing. We would love to partner with him if there are opportunities, whether it's going up there to where he's working and giving something to them or doing a seminar or whatever. We would love to continue our relationship with him beyond Greenville as well as keeping in touch with Greenville maybe a little better than we have in the past.

Jessica: Students would like to know what you're doing right now since you're not touring.

Steve: We're writing and preparing to start another record. That means a lot of downtime. But as Matt said earlier, it's kind of feast or famine with us. We're either home a lot or gone a lot so we're enjoying being active members of a family these days.

Charlie: Steve put a studio in his basement so it's really convenient for us to huddle up there without feeling a real pressure of the clock ticking, people dropping in or the studio tab accumulating. It's a real good season of freedom and hammering it out and seeing what we can work with.

Robyn: Does that erase the need for 2 am hours in the studio?

Charlie: We're still up 'til 2 am - we're just at home. Doing baby stuff. We're actually working a pretty consistent 9-5 schedule, which we really haven't done before. Well, we kind of did with Much Afraid - the Nashville part anyway.

Jessica: When it's time to start working on a new album and come up with something new again, how do you handle the pressure? How do you go about developing ideas for a new project?

Dan: We're just figuring that part out right now. It's the diving in that happens. It's the piggyback on what Charlie was saying about the studio. We work really well in a creative atmosphere - just trying to create new sounds and things like that.

When we were working on our last album the producer we were working with really encouraged us to write songs as if we weren't Jars of Clay - to just write in different styles, different genres. Eventually it's going to come back together in this culmination of all that influence. I think that's been a great exercise for us because, even on the new record we're starting to work on, the guys have really been just experimenting with a lot of different genres and different sounds and putting stuff together. When we actually get to the record it'll have a lot of different influences and hopefully we'll have shown some sort of progression and that we've challenged ourselves to move just a little further in our style.

Jessica: Within any organization everybody has a different role. Within a business there's usually someone who tells you what your role is or hires you for a specific role. How did you guys figure out the organizational aspect - who would be best at what?

Matt: (Smiling) Steve was really good at guitar so we let him play guitar and Charlie played keyboards and Dan…

Steve: It was really through happenstance that we encountered a lot of people - and I say happenstance but it was really through divine providence that we met some of the people that we did. The business of music is pretty creepy and there are a lot of bad seeds in the midst. We just had the good fortune through God's guidance to end up with a great business manager and a great guy to manage our career musically and people around us that get our vision.

It's totally a biblical principal to get the vision on the wall and then get everybody around you to understand that vision. And it's definitely changed from writing songs on campus upstairs in LaDue or on our dorm floor in Kinney. It's changed and it's gone through different phases but in some ways it's remained constant and people around us have flexed really well and set us up to grow.

Charlie: That took years.

Steve: Yeah, I'm surmising like five years. We had to find the right people and even within the band what our individual strengths are as far as communication or facilitating or those kinds of things that we need to do. We've had to kind of feel those things out by trial and error.

Jessica: With you being relatively new parents, I'm sure it's really nice now while you're off the road but how do you plan on balancing that when things pick up again?

Steve: We'll tell you how we did it in two years.

Dan: We still really have to keep a focus on our families. Touring has changed for us. We don't tour 300 dates a year anymore, we kind of scaled it back. We really hope to get to a place where we only have to tour once a year - tour when we want to.

We bring our wives and our kids on the road and it's difficult because that's usually a time that we can focus on our work and bringing our families out certainly adds a different dynamic but it's really important to do that. We've sort of made it a key that we're not gone from home more than two weeks at a time and if we are we take extra steps to bring our families out and to make sure that we're still connected. If we're not connected to them and our homes then what we do on the road becomes a lot less worth it. They're the roots that sort of feed the tree.

Robyn: I found that in Nashville keeping hearts aligned to the right things was such a struggle. I think a lot of times people came in with really good hearts and they got twisted a bit. What are some specific things that you have to do or not do to keep your heart aligned in the midst of the business?

Dan: I think it's really important if you're out there being an artist that's sort of representing the church or representing Christianity, you need to be connected to the church and you have to be under the authority of the church. I think that's a big step because what that means is you've got people that really are in your life to hold you accountable. And accountability is such a catch phrase - it's a word that's thrown around a lot - but I mean real intimacy with people that know you and really speak into your life.

We have a few people that come out on the road with us that know us really well. And if ever there's a key to dealing with your heart and keeping it in a place that's moldable it seems that it can only come from relationships you have with people and that takes a lot to build up but that's the most important thing. Stay connected with the church and people that love you well enough to speak hard things in your life and challenge you to move beyond your situation. Especially on the road it gets so easy to lose perspective and these are people who always bring perspective with them when they come out and spend time with us.

Matt: There's an element of it to where you have to really want that in your life. You have to want your heart to remain really healthy and alive to the gospel more than your job to be great or your music to be… And not that you won't walk through all sorts of light or dark seasons with that but at some level you have to really recognize that that's the greater priority and at least be willing to kind of pray and seek God about what it means to actually make that a priority in your life.

Ultimately it's finding yourself in a place of dependence and it's not something you can really describe without it sounding real general. But in walking through any sort of life, especially in the music world, there's no way to really do it and to continue to have a heart for Christ without doing it in a way that depends on him. It's a continual living in dependence on Christ. There's really no other ultimate answer to that because if you're not in a place of dependence on God, no matter how many good pastors you know or whatever, it won't really amount to a heart that knows him.

I think if you are in that place then you are free to walk through just about anything and you can still come through it with a gospel perspective and a love for what Jesus says. You can walk through an ugly relationship with a record company or a horrible band situation or a really successful career and still have some idea of what's important. You won't necessarily do it without bumps and bruises or scars but that, I think, has to be the core. Otherwise Christ is irrelevant.

Jessica: I know we have a lot of students with a desire to move to Nashville whether it's for performance or promotion or production or whatever. What tips or suggestions or pieces of advice would you give them?

Steve & Matt: Some practical advice… Move to Antioch because it's cheaper. Try to avoid Hickory Hollow between 4 & 5. You'll find the most apartments for the most reasonable amount there, though Belleview is slowly getting more reasonable.

Steve: There was a band last night and we were supposed to listen to them and give them a critique… Man, when we were here, no one told us what to do or gave us any critiques and I think that's a mindset to take for anyone who decides to go to Nashville or wherever. It's important just that they maintain that sense of freedom and creativity and not to be limited by the circumstance.

Matt: A lot of what we've learned in the last few years is that a big part of the heart of the gospel really is a heart of contentment and a heart that's satisfied with Christ and Christ alone. It's easy for us to come back to college and for them (Dan, Steve and Charlie) to kind of romanticize what happened here and have a different perspective on how rich the college experience was for them. And it's easy for students here to think about moving to Nashville or the next step in their lives and see that as the key to a more satisfying way of life.

Not that any of those dreams are inherently bad but for the students here God has a lot for them. We would encourage them to not miss that and to drink and feast on that and be fully satisfied with it and then if God draws you to Nashville, that'll be great. He'll surely be able to meet your needs and satisfy you wherever he draws you.