That the “Redemption Songs Tour” extended far beyond anyone’s expectations allowed the band to push themselves further and further and bring a less encumbered group to record "Good Monsters" with a dedication to remain unedited, both musically and lyrically, and capture an immediate emotion.

That immediacy is felt throughout "Good Monsters." The self-producing band cut the bulk of the record together in one room, with Haseltine often turning in a song’s definitive vocal on what was intended to be a scratch track. The album is the most assured recording Jars of Clay has ever made. Explains Haseltine, “We really cared more about the urgency and having a performance that was more reflective of a live setting. So we played everything together. There’s something about the power of performing live that we had never captured on an album before.”

Simultaneous to that experience was the band members’ growing discomfort with their perceived role as spokesmen that didn’t match up with their personal spiritual processes. “I think we’ve been a band that either by self-appointment or circumstance had to be kind of the voice of the Christian community,” says Haseltine. “After enough of that, you start to feel like that’s how you have to write because you’re forced into that perspective, and you have to give a context for every statement you make. For every lyric, there has to be a sort of biblical mandate. What I’ve come to realize is that that’s not how I live my life; it’s not how any of these guys live their lives. We wrestle with stuff. We make mistakes. I make mistakes. When we’re only writing songs that can provide a context, an argument for something, we aren’t really sharing those moments.”

“We are trying to bring the full weight and authority of the gospel to the music,” declares Mason. “There’s a tendency to condense the Scriptures, and especially what David said, to just take Psalm 119, [and condense it to] a few highlights. But man, there was some serious … blues. Some serious darkness going on that he was accessing. But, for being a man after God’s own heart, he asked a lot of what would be considered by today’s standards ‘insensitive’ questions of God. I think that the gospel’s a much more frightening implication if we believe it until death – that He truly will raise us from the dead. There are far-reaching implications that we barely access and we barely allow ourselves to access.”

Those feelings reflect big-time themes of the most intimate personal struggles:  self-awareness; the desire to be known; complicity in injustices both personal and global; and having the faith to ask God not just hard questions but harsh ones as well. The striking second verse of “Dead Man (Carry Me)” offers a glimpse into these themes: “I woke up from a dream about an empty funeral/ But it was better than the party full of people I don’t really know.”