How can we adequately express our dependence on God? Where is God going to meet us in our suffering? Am I alone in my doubt?

As with previous generations, music helps Christians manage hard questions of faith. With Redemption Songs: A Collection of Reinvented Ancient Hymns and Spiritual Songs, the best-selling, multi-award-winning pop/rock band Jars of Clay digs deep into Christian tradition to rediscover rich songs steeped with the ability to empower believers burdened by doubt and fear. These are time-honored treasures providing assurance that hope remains constant, through Christ’s life, death and resurrection.

This concept project represents Jars of Clay’s original contribution to music listeners’ sweeping fervor for worship music. Unique in its song selection and original in its musical approach, Redemption Songs is primed to be recognized as one of the pop/rock band’s most distinctive recordings to date. By overlaying it’s renowned pop sensibilities on historically significant church hymns and popular spirituals, Redemption Songs builds a bridge of relevance between generations of Christians, past and present. Guests on the project include Grammy Award-winning legends Blind Boys of Alabama, the renowned modern worship songwriter Martin Smith (Delirious) and Grammy-nominated new artist Sarah Kelly.

“We’re part of a culture that pushes forward for newer, more modern moments,” guitarist Matt Odmark says. “With this project, we’re trying to create an atmosphere where people look back and enjoy the depth of some older songs.”

Best known for hits like “Flood,” “Liquid,” “I Need You,” and “Show You Love”. Jars of Clay created Redemption Songs as a personal expression of the worship style that’s nurtured them since moving to Nashville nearly a decade ago. The band was making pop music history, first by skyrocketing to notoriety with its double-platinum debut, Jars of Clay, then building on its popular and critical acclaim with Grammy Award-winning projects Much Afraid and If I Left the Zoo. But simultaneously, the Dove Award-winning band’s collective faith also reached new heights, thanks to nurturing by a progressive Nashville church community keen to rediscovering church hymnody.

“We dug into hymns we were singing in church and discovered that what people were experiencing many, many years ago we’re still experiencing today. The story of humankind hasn’t changed,” guitarist Steve Mason explains. “We find comfort in knowing we’re not alone in our struggles.”

Tying together Redemption Songs is a theme of restoration, focusing on the heart of the gospel message and connecting heart and mind through worship. Providing nearly an hour’s worth of music, about half of the 13 tracks will be new to most listeners. Yet these tracks represent time-honored church compositions—some written one to three centuries ago.

-more-

Three types of tracks make up Redemption Songs. There are well-known hymns and spirituals stylized with a fresh, Jars of Clay treatment, including “I’ll Fly Away” and “Nothing But the Blood.”

“There is a strength in pulling these old songs that people might know too well out of their skin so that people can know the heart of them better by hearing them differently,” frontman Dan Haseltine says.

Next, the record’s larger portion is dedicated to hymns recast with new melodies, including “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” and “God Be Merciful to Me.” These songs are being sung at the band’s church and in congregations and college fellowship groups across the country.

Third are the historical titles being championed by the band for rich lyrical depth and beauty.

“We loved the process of finding old hymns and then writing melodies ourselves,” Haseltine says, describing hours of leafing through hymnals, like musicologists on a treasure hunt, discovering songs like “God Will Lift Up Your Head,” “Jesus, I Lift My Eyes” and “Hiding Place.”

“Hymns speak to the struggles of faith in language that is sometimes more direct than what we have today,” Dan continues. “‘I am evil, born in sin.’ Phrases like that that remind me of what the gospel is truly about.”

Keyboardist Charlie Lowell agrees. “You don’t listen to these songs once and go, ‘Cool, I got it.’ You have to live in the lyrics and really soak them up.”

Typically, hymns records find artists recording commonly-sung works rendered as listeners would expect to hear them, or artists do a modernized version of the basic melody. But because Jars of Clay chose a distinctly different path, this innovative band releases a truly original project.

Perhaps that originality is expressed best through musical experimental peppered throughout the project. Knowing Redemptions Songs was special, the band granted itself the freedom to try different textures and instruments. Listeners will hear dashes of pedal steel guitar, mandolin and fiddle not found on previous projects. Recorded primarily in the band’s Sputnik studio, some tracks were recorded with four or five musicians playing together to work out the parts.

“There was something very gospel-centered about the approach, even though it sometimes cause great frustration,” Mason says about recording “Nothing But the Blood,” “It Is Well,” “O Come and Mourn With Me Awhile” and others. “But it also fostered reliance on one another. Consequently, there is a passion and heart, derived from fighting through difficulty to arrive at something we’re all really excited about.”

Unified artistically and across the ages by the closing track, “They’ll Know We Are Christians,” Redemption Songs enables listeners to drive away the clanging of competing, ever-present human agendas, forging space for the heart, mind and soul to cling again to the redeeming gospel story of Christ. A beautiful, sturdy bridge between then and now.

“We hope the things that are old to people become new again. That’s the purpose of any sort of intentional move toward worship,” says Odmark. Mason agrees.

“We hope people are reminded and reoriented again to the gospel story, that what Jesus did for us was enough, and it is a gift that remains for us today,” Steve says. “We’re changed as a result of the gospel—empowered toward responding in love to God, empowered to respond in love to those around us, too. That changes families, and it changes communities.”

Truly an ancient message that never goes out of style.