Second, the album’s dark tone and lyrical complexity was not as appreciated by many in the mainstream Christian market, who loved the explicitly Christian imagery of the first album’s non-Flood singles and who made the band’s Love Song for a Savior into a perennial Christian radio hit for years afterward. First, by the time the album dropped, many non-Christian listeners who thought Flood was a jam had figured out that Jars was a Christian band and thus had lost interest. If I can speculate for a moment, I’d guess that the decline in sales was based on a couple of factors. Buoyed by the anticipation for new music, the album debuted well but didn’t have as much staying power (though enough to go platinum and earn the group a Grammy for Best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album). After the smashing success of the first record, Jars returned two years later with Much Afraid, a brooding, cerebral album of alternative work that felt very far removed from the jangly, vertically-oriented folk-rock of the self-titled. Since we won’t be getting to any tracks from Jars’ excellent second album for a while, now seems as good a time as any to continue our history lesson. Out of My HandsĪ late-period mid-tempo contribution to a benefit album for children rescued from sex trafficking. They’d pick up that maturity - and, thankfully, real drummers - as their career continued. This song, which describes child abuse with such unadorned lyrics as “Daddy, don’t you love me/Then why do you hit me?” is a perfect example of the band members meaning well but not quite being up to the task they set out for themselves. The drums almost universally sound thin, and while there are definitely some standout tracks, the band was not yet near the musical and lyrical heights they’d achieve over time. Though many diehard fans still acclaim the first album as the band’s best, I consider it one of the group’s weakest efforts. A 90s folk-rocker with strings, Gregorian chants and programmed drums (the band’s core lineup has remained constant for the entirety of their recording career, with no permanent bassist or drummer), it caught the zeitgeist at the exact right time, going multiplatinum off the strength of its lead single, Flood - a song which had the benefit of not being explicitly Christian, and thus more eligible for crossover success. Though Jars of Clay’s ultimate commercial decline came as Christian listeners slowly deserted them (and then a bunch more left all at once, but we’ll get to that), it’s hard to imagine they’d ever have been able to recapture the financial success of their self-titled debut album. If you’re new to Jars, I would call basically any song in the top 40 of this list a five-star absolute banger, the perfect fodder for an introductory playlist to some of the band’s best work. If you are a pre-existing Jars fan, feel free to be happy/disappointed/mad at where your favorite songs end up, and remember that the distinction between, say, song 85 and song 90 is completely arbitrary and also very small. I beg your pardon in advance for anything I may have missed, and thank you to the kind folks in the Jarchives fan group for contributing additional information to some of the following entries.įinally, this list uses no system other than my own preference, though I will give you some reasons for the rankings as I go, as well as providing a brief overview of the band’s history throughout. I did a lot of research for this and pulled from my extensive pool of knowledge of the band’s history, but I am an amateur music writer at best, and it’s possible there were gaps in my understanding that I could not see. It’s possible I may have gotten a few credits or instruments wrong here or there. If I liked a particular rerecording the best, I will tell you so (if there’s no notation, assume it was the original version). Jars was a band that liked to issue multiple versions of the same song, but every song is only on the list once, ranked by whichever version I think is the best. That means that bootlegs or Youtube clips don’t count the band had to release it for sale, as a giveaway, etc. The following list is, as best I can tell, every Jars of Clay song that has been released publicly in some sort of an official format (with potentially a few ultra-rare exceptions I wasn’t able to track down). Read my previous post for a little about why I find doing this worthwhile, and then read on for a couple of ground rules. As promised in part one of my Jars of Clay piece, I’m back to do a comprehensive, worst to best ranking of every one of the band’s songs.
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