Heidi Hall

For The Tennessean

Stephen Mason’s new barbershop is right next door to Nashville’s famed trailer/dive bar Santa’s Pub. There’s not much parking, but that’s OK because there’s only room for Mason, his Prohibition-era barber chair and a row of three theater seats for folks who are waiting.

The music is Duke Ellington. The decor is stacks of towels, bottles of Lucky Tiger aftershave and letterpress art of mustachioed men.

What there isn’t: any sign of the barber’s two decades as guitarist and vocalist for chart-topping, Grammy-winning Christian rock band Jars of Clay, best known to secular fans for crossover hit “Flood” in 1996.

There’s an easy narrative around Mason’s new career that says his old one was derailed by lead singer Dan Haseltine’s series of tweets in 2014 in support of same-sex marriage. Googling Haseltine’s name produces pages of articles on the resulting backlash and his ensuing explanation.

But the real story is more complicated. As the band’s religious beliefs shifted, it became tougher to play lucrative evangelical music festivals. They were getting older, and it was time to start thinking about plan B. On the other hand, there were good reasons to keep going.

They’d been together since Greenville College back in Illinois, had families to support — with no solid work experience outside of making music — and a nonprofit they’d launched to provide clean water in Africa, Blood:Water Mission.

Even before Haseltine’s Internet flap, Mason enrolled in barber school, preparing for a leap of faith.

“There are a lot of people who have been with Jars for a long time and just want to hear ‘Love Song for a Savior’ and ‘Like a Child’ and some of that stuff from the first record, and we are grateful for those fans,” he said on a recent Saturday at the shop. “We just couldn’t do it in a theme park or a church setting where they were going to co-opt what we had written about and sung and make it about somebody else’s agenda, and that was happening more and more. Even just sharing the bill with speakers who would suggest things where we would think, ‘This is the last thing I want a teenager to hear.’ ”

Mason was raised General Association of Regular Baptist Churches but converted to Episcopalian, is a member at St. Bartholomew’s in Nashville and speaks enthusiastically about his new experiences there.

“There were times in my own journey where I wondered if my shadow should even darken the stoop of church because of what I grew up with and what it meant to be OK,” he said.

Deceit, death and drought bring awakening for Blood:Water

In response to an emailed interview request, Haseltine — who has shifted more attention to Blood:Water post-touring — confirmed that making a transition was inevitable. (He didn’t address questions about the role his tweets did or didn’t play.) The rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle allows musicians to avoid responsibility, he wrote, and it took years for Jars to wake up to music business realities and start considering their families’ quality of life.

“Stephen was the youngest of the group and probably had a bit more of a journey to catch up, but he was also the catalyst in many ways,” Haseltine wrote. “He was the first to start taking online college courses and to start seriously thinking beyond his role in Jars of Clay. To see him building his own business and having success with it has been inspiring.

“He gives a great haircut.”

The band’s name is a biblical reference from 2 Corinthians, and much of its early work is distinctly religious, but Jars of Clay didn’t plan to be relegated to the gospel charts, Mason said. That’s where it landed, however, despite tour dates with Matchbox 20 and Sting and later songs where religious references are tough to detect.

Its most recent studio album, “Inland,” didn’t necessarily belong in the contemporary Christian music market, said John J. Thompson, former creative director at Capitol Christian Music Group and associate dean at Trevecca Nazarene University’s music school. And he doesn’t think fans who stayed with Jars from the beginning found Haseltine’s tweets surprising because they would have heard a philosophy of grace and generosity being espoused for years.

“More than anything, I think that incident convinced them this wasn’t the game they wanted to play anymore,” Thompson said. “And they didn’t have to. That life of touring and full-time music isn’t as fun as people think it is.”

Christian music executive Dan Keen, now a professor in Belmont University’s music business college, remembers his years at ASCAP, tracking Jars of Clay’s rise with fascination and envy — they were with competitor BMI. He said “Flood” had a marked impact on the culture, with that hit and others earning spots in television and movies.

“They made some great records, but when you’ve had a huge song like ‘Flood,’ it’s hard to keep going if you can’t equal it,” he said. “To me, their arc is a very normal arc in the music business.”

He tells his students to rock as hard as they can for as long as they can, but don’t skip out on an education, because they’ll ultimately have to find other ways to make a living.

But barbering, Keen said, is a highly unusual next phase for rock stars.

Mason credits his wife, Jude, for helping guide him toward it. She pointed out that he is a man who plucks his eyebrows and pays attention to detail, so the aesthetics field made sense. And a questionnaire aimed at finding his strengths came up with “winning others over.”

Barbering also allows him to leave days open to get back together with band mates and play house shows or small venues, which he finds newly invigorating.

He named his shop The Handsomizer, and that recent Saturday found Mason plying his trade on the head of young Eyan Bonner while the teen’s father, Patrick, stood in the doorway waiting — as pleased with the chance to connect with Mason, he said, as with the sharp new look he planned to get.

Mason’s hands flew, trimming strays and shaving sharp angles, the snips and buzzes and big-band music a soundtrack behind comfortable conversation — as comfortable as he was across the years cracking jokes over thousands of fans’ adoring screams.

Maybe even more comfortable.

Heidi Hall is The Tennessean’s former religion editor. Contact her on Twitter @HeidiHallTN.