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On August 19th,
2003, Over the Rhine will celebrate the
release of their tenth album by making it a double.
Ohio boasts two full-length
discs of new material. And that most astonishing thing is that, after
they have played for ten years to stellar reviews,
chances are 9 out of 10 that
you’re reading this and saying to yourself “Who are Over the Rhine?”
Somehow those who
discover the band always come to the same conclusion: “These guys are
going to be big.” But they have not yet become “big” in the sense of
Rolling Stone covers or MTV or Super Bowl halftime shows.
The fans, when they stop and think about it,
are probably grateful. There is something
intimate and immediate about the band’s live shows that would be
difficult to duplicate in a large arena. But they show no signs
of slowing down, and that breakout may yet
happen, especially with the catchy
new single “Show Me” reaching the radio and
euphoric numbers like “B.P.D.",
“Changes Come”, "Long Lost Brother", and "Bothered"
burning at the four ends of that new
double-album.
Perhaps the
poetic, discomfortingly honest nature of their lyrics have set them
apart as a bit too literary for the fast-food consuming crowd that
browses the aisles of Tower Records looking for music instead
of listening for it.
But those who
care about art, beauty, subtlety in musicianship, the history of
American music, and good writing tend to find their way eventually to
this band from Cincinnati.
'Over the Rhine'
has been the moniker over several combinations of performers, but two
names have stayed the same—Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist.
They're two unique
singer/songwriters born in the Ohio Valley that first had a love for
music, then found a love of collaboration, and eventually fell into
the kind of love about which most great songs have been written.
Currently gearing up for a major tour, Detweiler and Bergquist are
joined by bassist Rick Plant, who
recently toured with Buddy Miller; drummer Will Sayles;
and multi-instrumentalist Paul Moak
for what promises to be one of the most thrilling live shows ever to
take place under the banner Over the Rhine.
I
caught up with Linford a couple of weeks after witnessing their tour
kickoff concert at the Cornerstone festival in Illinois. We chatted a
bit about the festival and its remarkable history, and then got down
to business discussing the new project.
A Double-Album?!
Jeffrey: You've certainly been busy writing
songs! What did this double-album idea come from?
Linford:
I think as far as the turning point, we had been thinking in the
studio about which ten or twelve songs are we going to pick to embody
this experience of recording and everything that was happening around
us, and which ten songs were we going to
save for a year and a half later. And that’s what was killing us. I
didn’t feel like we could pull 10 songs out.
So I
sat down and talked with the band and it just popped into my head—double
album. I said it to Karin and Paul. Of
course immediately it had the sense of a joke, but a few minutes later
we said “Wait a minute!” It just made a weird sort of sense. I called
two journalists that I trust just to see how it hit them, one in
England and another one here in the States.
Both of them were very skeptical at the outset. I mean, “double
album”, it just sounds self-indulgent and silly. Both of them had the
same reaction that we had. About five minutes later they were too
curious to dismiss the idea outright.
We
were only really willing to do it if our label would agree to sell it
for the price of a single CD. The compromise was that they needed to
tack on an extra buck to cover the packaging. Everybody came on board.
It’s
our 10th project. It just felt like it might be fun to do something a
little different. We’re going to do a special edition on vinyl, in a
gate-fold jacket. We’re really excited because we’ve never done a
release on vinyl before.
We
started thinking about it and thought, well, we can’t really imagine
the history of rock and roll without The White Album … London
Calling … Exile on Main Street … Songs in the Key of Life. Believe
me, there aren’t very many good ones. It’s funny, people are very
passionate about double albums. Everyone has a few that they can’t
imagine their record collection existing without.
I’m
curious to know if we made a big mistake.
We have both
albums on all the time! But I do think the listener might need to take
a deep breath between the two parts…
And I love that you can do that! It’s two fairly digestible records.
You can listen to one and then put it away and take a break. I like
that more than trying to put fourteen songs onto one cd and having a
really long record. It made sense.
For
a double album to work, there has to be a lot of variety. There has to
be something in each song that is quintessential to the band. It could
be just one line in the lyrics. That’s what we went for. It was an
intuitive process.
For the record, Disc One is my personal favorite.
[chuckles] I’ll be very interested in the responses of people who have
followed the band’s music regarding which disc they like better. We’ve
had a strong number of raised hands in our circle of friends where
people seem to love Disc Two. Something started to happen on that CD.
As
far as the sequence of what went on the first and what went on the
second—I didn’t really think about it that much. We had just finished
mixing and I went back to the hotel room and I had to come up with a
sequence so the label could hear the record, and that was my first
attempt… and we just went with it.
On
Disc One, I was thinking of Side A and Side B, like turning the record
over after “Ohio”. It felt to me like Disc One is the essence of what
we did, and Disc Two is more like… “All this stuff happened too.” But
there were too many songs we couldn’t do without.
You carried a lot
with you into this period of songwriting. It’s been a heavy couple of
years for you and Karin, with all the unexpected events that took
place with Karin’s mother.
It
was a tragic thing that happened out of the blue. Karin’s mother
[Barbara] is 69 and she suddenly suffered a devastating stroke that
left her in a wheelchair only partially able to communicate. Karin has
had to go through this whole grieving process for the loss of a
parent. And she lost her father unexpectedly back in ‘94. Of the
people in our circle of friends, Karin is the first to have to deal
with a lot of these issues. Most of us have not had to navigate that
terrain yet.
The
good news is that Barbara is well cared-for. She does have some
ability to communicate. She is comfortable and is trying to make the
best of it.
Karin has weathered it well, all in all. We’re going to break up the
tour so she’s not away for more than three weeks at a time. We’ll go
home and check in and make sure everything’s okay. She visits her mom
a couple of times a week. It used to be several times a year, so
that’s good in one way; it’s too bad it has to be in a nursing home.
But yeah, she’s doing all right. Thank you for asking.
Karin has really enjoyed getting to know the workers and the residents
where her mom lives. Someone described the place as a head-on
collision between comedy and tragedy. It’s been heartbreaking and
hilarious, inspiring and sobering, you know? It runs the whole gamut
in there.
You frequently
mention the value of eavesdropping to a writer. There must be a lot of
inspiration in experiences you have there, interacting with the
residents.
When
you’re just sort of getting your feet wet there, yeah, there’s a lot
to take in. Karin’s been in there more than I have.
One
of my first memorable experiences there: a lady wheeled herself up to
me and said, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to bother you. I don’t mean to
be a burden. I was wondering if you could help me. We gotta get
outta here!” [laughs]
With
Alzheimer’s patients there’s just this sense of being lost and wanting
to find your way back home. One would say, “How do we get back to
shore?” Karin has talked about going up to this woman named Geneva
[who responded to her by
exclaiming “Only God can save us now!”]
It
goes back to that metaphor of having ‘ears to hear and eyes to see’…
there are these little clues, these little snippets of the eternal
that are constantly coming into focus for a few moments and then
disappearing. I often wonder how much we miss.
Just
from a writing standpoint, there are little bits of interesting
language constantly coming at us and we want to take some time to snag
things.
Yesterday I was filling up the car with gas, and I saw something on
the pump, a little notice that said: The gasoline island is under
constant surveillance.
The gasoline island! It was so
great.
There are so many cultural and societal movements that would gladly
turn us into passive bystanders. I think part of the artist’s calling
is to try to rip that veil open and help people keep their eyes open.
OHIO
… and the Guy who Kept Showing Up
Well, the theme of
Being Lost and Trying to Find Our Way Home is clearly winding through
the lyrics of the new album!
Good!
The album is such
a journey… like a tour of Dante’s Inferno, with stories about
mourning, loss, marriages in trouble, the bruises of abuse. And yet
there is so much beauty throughout the album.
I’m curious. You
mentioned a couple of other titles that were in the running—Only
God Can Save Us Now and then Elvis is King and Jesus is
Lord. But you settled on Ohio. Do you feel these songs are all
connected in some way to the Midwestern experience?
We
had a number of working titles. We went with Ohio because, over
the course of recording this series of songs—I guess a lot of people
take a long time to get to this place I’m about to describe—we
realized that this music is what we do. And it’s probably not going to
go away any time soon. As far as writing and recording songs… I’m
guessing we’re going to be doing that for the next twenty years. It
felt like we were coming home to that place… that music has a lot to
do with why we are here.
We’re finally allowed to just own that
without being edgy about it, without being haunted by this feeling
that any day now we’re going to move on and get on with our “real
lives”, or something more important, or any number of those fears and
doubts that sometimes provide a backdrop for the artist. It just felt
like coming home.
The
very first song we recorded for the collection was Karin’s song
Ohio. She plays more piano on this record.
It seemed to be a central song to the project.
In
the last couple of years we’ve thought a lot about moving away, and
realized that in some strange way this is home and probably always
will be. We’ve got great friends here and… I don’t know. It was a
simple title and it seemed to feel right.
And yet, there is
this sense of transition throughout the record, a sense of loss and
painful change in the world beyond the borders of Ohio. You mentioned
that the day you wrote “Changes Come” was the day you turned on the
news and saw tanks rolling through Baghdad and Bethlehem.
Karin wrote the music for that song, and she wrote the chorus
hook—“Changes come, turn my world around.” We sat down together and
wrote those verses pretty quickly. And then we recorded it in one
take: She played guitar and sang and I played piano, and then I went
back and recorded the Hammond organ and she started developing the
little ‘Karin choir’ in the background.
It
was a really cathartic moment for us. There’s this sense of sadness
and disappointment that pervaded the recording sessions. On the one
hand it was a really joyful time for us, but watching what went down
in Iraq and what was going on in the Middle
East we had this
overwhelming feeling like ‘We’ve got to be further along by now!”
There was sort of this sense of helplessness and yet we wanted to stay
focused on our work, which was in some ways the most redemptive
response we had to what was going on. It gave substance to our beliefs
that we live in a world where ideas are more powerful than ‘smart
bombs.’
We’ve been thinking a lot about children and, like every prospective
parent, the world we’re bringing a child into. Sometimes the only sane
response is “Thy Kingdom come”, whatever that means in terms of what
we can get our hands on, whatever we can do to push the world in a
direction where something like Christ’s Kingdom makes sense.
Jesus kept turning up on this record. That can be a little bit
problematic when you’re trying to do your work. We were recording
songs, making a double album, and Jesus kept turning up. But we were
up for it.
I guess our prayer would be that if we are haunted by Christ, which of
course we are, that it is the Christ that declared obsolete forever
the “kill or be killed” approach to resolving differences, the Christ
who turned over the tables of those who were trying to make a buck off
of salvation. The Christ that turned water into exceptionally
noteworthy wine. That’s the Christ that I want to be haunted by, that
I would welcome… I would welcome that Christ’s influence on any song.
That’s a kingdom that I still deeply believe in, in terms of where I
am with Christianity, in terms of growing up in the Church. In some
ways it’s hard for me to get really interested in this idea of getting
right with God so we can be whisked away to heaven, and experience
eternal bliss. But when I start thinking in terms of there being a kingdom
that could come to earth to resolve all of this madness, that’s what I
start getting excited about, that’s what I start remembering. I start
remembering that, yeah, people could die for this. There is
something potentially revolutionary going on that can heal deep-seated
violence and roots of bitterness that seem to poison our best efforts
It did startle me
... how openly you addressed faith
throughout the album. I was chewing on that as I listened, trying to
figure out why it came across so differently than it does on so much
of what is called ‘Christian music’. I think it is because you
grounded it so much in personal poetry and in place.
Grounding the
lyrics so much in a specific place, in the heart of our country, with
these specific stories, it seems so much more honest, so much like a
part of something larger… instead of sounding like you have an agenda. People won’t feel
like they’re being shouted at. It will give them more of that feeling
that maybe they are eavesdropping… on someone’s private thoughts.
You
are totally onto something. The fact of the matter is that America’s
music has something to do with gospel music and blues and jazz and
rock and roll. Part of the process of coming home for me is a
continuing sense of where I come from and who I am. More and more I
find myself willing to be open about that.
You can’t divorce what I do
musically from the music that I grew up with… the hymns that I grew up
with… some of the gospel music my dad discovered. He loved playing Mahalia Jackson—don’t ask me how or why he found her records, but he
did and he loved it. It was part of the musical fabric of my
childhood. On the one hand all of these hymns are seeping into it
constantly, and yet I’m in the back of a Buick wildcat convertible
with my brothers and friends as a 7-year-old listening to Credence
Clearwater Revival. Trying to get these worlds to co-exist as a child
is quite an adventure.
Anyway, I know at times we went far out of our way to downplay our
deep deep roots in this place called Ohio. But I was born here and
Karin and I were both raised here. A lot of our formative years were
spent in Ohio. Karin was born in California but moved to Ohio when she
was about 7 and grew up in Ohio. We met at a small college in Ohio.
There’s a liberal arts and literary thing in Ohio that is part of the
mix—like Oberlin and Kenyon. I think the Kenyon Review was the first
literary magazine to publish Flannery O’Connor. So there’s a strange
mix of the church, the Midwest, literature… To me it feels like this
music is connected pretty deeply to where I come from and the ground
we’ve covered.
“Making the
Record We Wanted to Make”
This is your
second album for Virgin/Backporch… third if you count the re-release
of Good Dog Bad Dog. After the dismantling of the I.R.S.
label where you were previously, how is this going?
They
didn’t hear a note of any song or any demo [for Ohio.] They
didn’t come by the studio when we were recording. We had complete
carte blanche as far as making the record we wanted to make. They get
big big points for that… lots of extra credit. They worked very hard
on Films for Radio, and have typically done right by us. I
don’t have any complaints about the label. I feel like they’re doing a
good job. And today they start advertising the first single—“Show Me.”
On the subject of
specific songs: What does the title of the first song—“B.P.D.”—stand
for?
It
stands for Borderline Personality Disorder.
That
song is sort of a mental note that Karin wrote, but really it’s a note
for both of us. We have a habit of trying to rescue people in ways
that are probably counterproductive. It’s been a process of learning
that not everybody who cries “Save me!” is interested in changing
their life in any significant way. We’ve had to learn that through a
couple of difficult experiences, but good and necessary experiences.
Our
songs are in some ways moving away from the confessional thing and
into more of a narrative approach. Music for us involved a lot of
internal work on our records. Now some of that work is done and we’re
looking around and coming to grips with the fact that all is not right
with the world and we need to engage.
What prompted the
re-recording of “Bothered” [which was previously on the album
Eve.]
The
drummer gets the credit for that. We’d never recorded a band version
of the song. We played it last December, and Will came up with that
groove, and he really wanted to record it. So we just kinda did on a
whim, thinking we would use it for a b-side or something. When the
whole double-album thing became possibility, we decided to include it.
People respond to that song and still want to hear it live.
It's like it
still has work to do.
Have you been
listening to anything lately that’s really captured you?
We
really enjoyed that Daniel Lanois record [Shine]. We had to promise
ourselves we wouldn’t buy records while we were in the studio, so as
soon as we were finished we ran out and bought the new Daniel Lanois
and the new Lucinda Williams. We’re going to go see David Gray and a
new band called Turin Brakes. Karin really likes Turin Brakes.
They're a
British duo. Their first record kinda snuck up on her, and she’s a big
fan now.
We
like that new Radiohead record [Hail to the
Thief], but I’m really hungry for them to
write the great songs that I know they can write. I know they’ve been
really self-conscious about not trying to make another OK Computer.
But unfortunately they let the cat outta the bag—we know they can
write those amazing five minute worlds and they’ve been running from
song structure ever since.
You’re still
experimenting with different styles too. This also feels like the most
country-flavored project you’ve produced.
Which, again, is part of owning up to our roots. There was this radio
show, Jamboree U.S.A., which was the oldest radio show playing in the
U.S., and all of these people would come through every Saturday
night.—Johnny Cash, Willie, Emmylou. My parents would flick that on in
the background sometimes.
A Calling to
write songs
Growing up in the
church, around artists, you hear the word “calling” a lot. So many
singer/songwriters will refer to their art as their “calling.” But
when I look at the Scriptures, it seems that a calling was something
that people ran away from, terrified by it. It was a discomforting
thing.
Some use the term
in a way that seems to mean merely a desire to play for God or paint
for God. But when that happens, the term can also be used as an excuse
for what is sometimes really lousy art. We hear people denying
constructive criticism because “God called me to write this” or “How
can you question what I’m doing? It’s my calling.”
Do you make a
distinction between a calling and merely a desire to use what God has
given you? And would you say you have felt a distinct calling?
One
of Kathleen Norris’s books—Amazing Grace—has a chapter
called “Chosen.” [He happens to have the book with him, and thumbs
quickly through it.] On page 139 in Amazing Grace she
addresses that whole concept of responding with ‘Thanks, but no
thanks’ and the fact that a calling is a dangerous thing. I think what
she has to say about it is pretty powerful.
Mike Roe of the
77s and Lost Dogs talks about a time when the clouds parted and he
encountered God calling him to go into ministry, and he ran the other
way for a long time.
I am
close to being able to say that songwriting is my calling. I may not
use those words, but I think I secretly do believe that at this point.
It’s been a long 20-year journey for me to start getting to a place
where I can be comfortable saying that. I think I probably have tried
to run the other way a few times. Believe it or not, I was very open
to doing something that was less crazy than trying to make a living as
a songwriter and all of the traveling involved in something like that.
But… “Just when I thought I was out they keep pulling me back in!” …
to quote The Godfather via The Sopranos.
I
often wonder how much of what I do has to do with my own desire. I
think there might have been an important saying in the Gospel of
Thomas that got lost along the way… that said something to the effect
of “Don’t do something that you hate and never tell a lie.” I think
there are a lot of people who, in the name of something-or-other, have
chosen a life that they don’t really enjoy. I’m not saying it’s going
to be bliss all the time to pursue your calling. It’ll be a
heartbreaking journey to pursue your heart’s desires.
There’s a school of thought that I grew up with that said,
‘If you enjoy music then that’s probably something that you need to
give up.’ That approach to life is certainly a sad one.
I asked a fellow
Over the Rhine fan recently what she’d like to ask the band. She came
up with a question that I and many others involved in the arts
struggle with—people who try to devote themselves fully to their own
artistic ambitions while also trying to make ends meet. So she burst
out with the question, “How did they pay the bills all those years
while working on their records and touring?”
[laughing] For being a bunch of losers we’ve really been blessed!
Seriously, we’ve sometimes struggled with what Julie Miller describes
as times when you’re “between money.” All in all it’s been rather
miraculous that we’ve been able to do this. I feel a strange
combination of having been blessed beyond my expectations while
simultaneously being ignored [laughs again].
But
I feel like things are often the way they’re supposed to be. We’ve
seen in other people who have reached different forms of success that
there is overwhelming damage control that needs to be called in. Our
journey has been the right one for us and we have been watched over.
When I first interviewed you in 2000, you were
thinking seriously about writing your memoirs and putting them all
down in a book. And then you eventually published a sort of prologue
and made it available online. How is that project going? We
enjoyed the piece you published.
That
was a sort of introduction to this memoir that I keep scratching away
at.
But I turned a corner when we were
making this record, and that is that I’m a songwriter at the end of
the day. Yeah, I still want to bang together a memoir when the time is
right. But being a songwriter is going to keep me busy … I’ve had to
make peace with that. I do a fair bit of additional writing for my own
sanity, to figure stuff out. But… I’m a songwriter.
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