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I’m arriving in Cincinnati tomorrow afternoon. It’ll be my first visit there, and I couldn’t be more excited about attending ALL THREE 20th anniversary concerts for Over the Rhine this weekend. If you’re going to be there, let me know. Maybe we can meet and chat.

I’ll be writing an essay about Over the Rhine soon, and this experience will be a vital part of that project.

But this will also be a “working weekend” in other ways as well. I’m caught up in the Gold Strand of The Auralia Thread. Cal-raven’s Ladder is taking shape, and I’m more excited about this story than either of the previous two. So between concerts, I’ll be hard at work. (Have you noticed the tribute to Over the Rhine in Cyndere’s Midnight? They’re in the Acknowledgments, yes… but there’s a passage early in the book  that I included especially for them. I suspect die-hard OTR fans will notice.)

Meanwhile, I’ll be missing out on what has become one of the most enchanting snowfalls I’ve ever seen in Seattle. Anne and I went for a walk this evening that was just spooky in its quiet beauty.

Choose your version… it doesn’t matter. And then…
DO YOUR PART TODAY. Post the song on your blog. 

Here’s a free download of “If a Song Could Be President”: http://tinyurl.com/5crqr2¬†

Spread the good news of Over the Rhine to the whole world. Seriously, has there ever been a greater opportunity to wake up the world to America’s best-kept musical secret?

Special thanks to my spokesmodel: Amanda Jolman.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the song’s from The Trumpet Child.

 

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?!

Overstreet:

You’ve certainly been busy writing songs! What did this double-album idea come from?

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

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…

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

For the record, Disc One is my personal favorite.

Detweiler:

[laughs] 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.

Overstreet:

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.

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

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.

Detweiler:

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

Overstreet:

Well, the theme of Being Lost and Trying to Find Our Way Home is clearly winding through the lyrics of the new album!

Detweiler:

Good!

Overstreet:

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?

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

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.

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

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.

Detweiler:

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”

Overstreet:

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?

Detweiler:

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.”

Overstreet:

On the subject of specific songs: What does the title of the first song—“B.P.D.”—stand for?

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

What prompted the re-recording of “Bothered” [which was previously on the album Eve.]

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

Have you been listening to anything lately that’s really captured you?

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

You’re still experimenting with different styles too. This also feels like the most country-flavored project you’ve produced.

Detweiler:

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

Overstreet:

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?

Detweiler:

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.

Overstreet:

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?”

Detweiler:

[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.

Overstreet:

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.

Detweiler:

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.

[This interview was originally published at the website for a non-profit arts organization called Promontory Artists Association.]

•

Linford Detweiler has learned to take it easy.

It’s a Saturday afternoon in Seattle, unusually sunny for late February, and he joins my wife Anne and me for coffee and cranberry juice at the University Plaza Hotel, his home for the weekend, far from his Cincinnati headquarters. Linford, his wife singer/songwriter Karin Bergquist, and their band––Over the Rhine––are in town for two special shows, a momentary tangent from their larger purpose…touring with the Cowboy Junkies.

This tour has brought new opportunity and energy to Over the Rhine, not to mention exposure to a larger audience. Appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and Sessions at West 54th have placed them on well-watched platforms. This publicity is an unexpected highlight after a period in which their previous record label, I.R.S., folded, and their future seemed uncertain. It’s been a decade-long rollercoaster ride from varying levels of obscurity to varying levels of fame.

Now, a new record contract with Virgin/Backporch may be the greatest opportunity they’ve yet had. While Over the Rhine have never been in the Top 40 or on the cover of Rolling Stone, word-of-mouth is having a cumulative effect. Current celebrities Sixpence None the Richer even thank Linford and Karin for their influence. The new deal has brought most of their recordings back into print; their latest independent work, the critically acclaimed Good Dog Bad Dog, is available in a new package with the addition of a new song.

An adventure like this might make some performers a bit shaken, anxious, exhilarated. But Linford seems content to take it in stride. Our conversation does not dwell on their imminent celebrity status, politics, other musicians, or scandals, but rather on books, songwriting, and the personal experiences that enrich his writing.

•

What are you reading these days?

A book that I just started is called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I kept hearing her name, and my sister Grace lent me a few excerpts from it last time I was up visiting her. And Karin picked up a copy of Traveling Mercies. So Lamott is the current writer in our lives. We’re going to be performing at the writer’s conference at Calvin College. It’s a pretty amazing little gathering up there. Anne Lamott’s one of the main speakers, and Maya Angelou, one Karin’s favorites is speaking as well. And Chaim Potok.

I tend to come across a writer and try to read a good handful of what they wrote before I move on. My sister Grace and I both quit reading when we got to high school. We both went to boarding school in Western Canada, and we’d been avid readers. I didn’t start reading again until I was a junior in college. In school, we read what was assigned to us; we didn’t read for pleasure. The author that got me reading again was C.S. Lewis. Then I went through a big Dylan Thomas phase. I read a lot of what he wrote. Then I discovered Southern American writers like Flannery O’Connor and read everything she wrote, and then Annie Dillard. I’ve been reading a lot of Frederick Buechner’s stuff.

How did you get started writing songs and starting a band?

I wish I could say that my starting a band was shrouded in mystery, that it was some sort of profound artistic part of the project. But I was just naïve. I loved music. We said to ourselves, let’s start a band, get our songs on the radio, make a lot of money, live in England, buy a farm…. And while we didn’t achieve a level of success that we’d hoped for right away, we have in one sense or another accomplished most of these things. Just not all at once. It’s been life changing in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I learned fairly early that being famous was not what I really cared about. What I do love and care about is the words.

What do you find is the best kind of support and encouragement you receive from your friends and your fellow songwriters?

Michael Wilson has been a great inspiration. He was the first real “artist” that showed me what art could be about. He has this ability to pick out the unremarkable details of our lives and hand them back in a way that makes us see them for the first time. He’s shown me how we can learn to keep our eyes open to what’s behind the fabric of the ordinary. His work has been hugely influential. He’s also a very deep listener. He introduced me to a lot of good things. For example, he was the first person to play Tom Waits for me. Now that’s a perspective-altering experience!

And there’s another individual… I suppose technically he’s my pastor…. Dave Nixon. He’s a gifted writer, he has his doctorate in classical languages. He married Karin and I. He’s in the process of working through reinventing what church might look like.

It’s an extra challenge to work together with Karin as a creative couple, isn’t it? How do you two manage to work together as a team? Do you do most of your work together, or separately?

Karin and I… we’re together probably more than any other couple I’ve ever met. We do try to give each other some degree of solitude, to give each other that gift of time. We’ll work separately and then bring our work and sit down together. She’ll play me a song, and often I’ll say, “Don’t change a thing.” Other times, she will have worked out the melody and I’ll supply the words. Often I’ll have a whole song worked out ahead of time. I see my job as being to write songs that allow her voice to bloom.

Many of our readers tell me about struggling with their work, about lack of success, doubts about their calling to be an artist. A lot of your work seems to deal with periods of doubt, struggle, darkness, even depression. Tell me about how you’ve dealt with the hard times as an artist, how you’ve worked through them.

There have definitely been difficult times. At the beginning sometimes things wouldn’t go the way we wanted them to, and I’d think “I’m not cut out to do this.” Some of the most difficult relationships of my life so far have occurred with somebody that I was working with in the band. And that has been an exhilarating and sometimes devastating exercise in being a human being.

I go to this Trappist monastery called Gethsemane in Kentucky, just two hours from Cincinnati where I live. They have about a thousand-acres there where I can walk and think. I found out about it reading Thomas Merton. It’s a chance to be quiet. When I’m there I realize that the world really is a noisy place.

I went down to the monastery in 1995 and said “I think I’m going to let it go” and I made peace with that. Because of these stories we grow up with in the church, I had the image of Abraham’s son on the altar. And I basically said, “That’s it. I put it down. I’m free. I’m still young, and I’m going to go rethink my life.” But when I got home, the first message on my machine said, “Hey, Linford… every spring Miles Copeland has this retreat with writers at his castle in Southern France and we’d like you to come over and hang out with songwriters and be a part of this. We’ll pay your way. All you have to do is show up.” And then the next message was something else. Everywhere I turned it was clear, “Don’t quit music. You’ve started a story that’s not yet completed.” So I ended up staying in it. And I feel really excited about that part of it now.

The mystery at the heart of so many creative people is that we’re trying to make sense of the story that we’ve been handed and the story that we’re helping to write with our lives. We write to try to figure out what we believe is true, and to try to make sense of what’s happened. On the one hand we bemoan difficult childhoods… or whatever it is…but on the other hand those difficult things make us who we are. It wasn’t Karin’s first choice for her dad to leave and never come back when she was three years old, for her to be the odd girl growing up in a small town in Ohio, the only one without a father…. Whatever pain was part of Karin’s journey has made Karin who she is. And she wouldn’t sing what she does if she had no abandonment. You listen to a song like “Poughkeepsie”, and you know she’s definitely wrestled with depression at times.

You’re reminding me of watching Roberto Begnini win his Oscar in 1998. He ran to the microphone and thanked his parents for the greatest gift they could ever have given him… poverty.

Yes! Karin taped that, and we re-played that so often. I think that’s why I desire to write more and more. To try to make sense of the story of my past. And what went down in my family…oh, if you only knew. There’s a lot there, and I feel like I’m ready to start opening it up and looking at it. I think that’s where it starts. It starts with what we experience, and if it ends up being a fictitious character or a memoir or whatever, it doesn’t really matter.

•

So I go up Poughkeepsie,
look out o’er the Hudson
and I cast my worries to the sky.
Now I still know sorrow,
but I can fly like the sparrow
’cause I ride on the backs of the angels tonight.

-from “Poughkeepsie”

•

Do you write for an audience or for yourself? You make it sound like songwriting is a very personal private thing you do for yourself.

What goes along with writing for yourself is accepting the fact that your audience may be non-existent. It’s not really fair to write to please yourself and then bemoan the fact that you’re not hugely popular.

I’ve learned this from other artists that I respect. If you can’t say to others “To hell with what you think” to some degree, you’ll second guess yourself, and you’ll never create anything. A fair amount of what I do, I do based on a set of instincts that I’ve developed, by paying attention to what I love or what moves me, and hanging around with people that inspire me. I’ve never done anything that I really care about while trying to second-guess what somebody’s going to like. The healthy position for me is what I called in a song ‘healthy apathy’.

I’m not really big on seeing a newspaper clipping and thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to write a song about that.” I’m not one of those writers like Bruce Cockburn who tries to get a point across; it’s more of an intuitive thing. I’m trying to tell something that feels taut from beginning to end. I learn about what I’ve written along with everybody else.

C.S Lewis talked about wanting to “delight” and “instruct” in his writing. Sometimes the wanting-to-instruct was a bit too much for me. But he certainly did delight as well.

You certainly don’t preach at us, like the Christian music you hear on religious radio. But the language of faith is woven throughout your work. It seems that right now there are lot of artists blurring the lines between other genres and Christian music, revealing more of what is possible for a musician of faith.

What has been your relationship and experience with the church and church communities in view of your music?

I’ve made it a point not to engage with the reactionaries. I try not to go into a place where the people expect us to be something that we’re not. When we started Over the Rhine part of my naïve self, having grown up in the church, hoped that Over the Rhine would be somehow a damaging blow to “Christian Music” in that it would be something that would blur the lines and draw people away from that mentality. And to some extent I think we’ve succeeded in shaking that up a bit.

I can remember people looking at us eight or nine years ago and thinking we were something alien in that we would play 150 club shows a year and then play the Cornerstone and Greenbelt festivals. People that were exposed to us at Cornerstone thought that we were a little bit odd. But now it’s a “no-brainer” for some band that came out of somebody’s youth group to go play in a club. Everybody does it now.

We did stop once at the Creation festival, right before we signed with I.R.S. Records. We were out on tour, we were going to play Cornerstone the next week. We thought “Why don’t we just stop by and put our records out.” We could set up a little booth and find a few allies. And we were almost run out of there! It was one of those classic things where mothers gather together to protect their children from all of this “New Age” imagery. Karin and I were hanging out there biding our time and people would approach us in groups, a spokesperson with other people looking over their shoulder. We tried to engage them. One of the directors of the festival stopped by because well-meaning sixteen year-olds were coming back with their youth pastors’ arms on their shoulders saying, “I want to give this tape back. You never mentioned Jesus anywhere.” Whatever. It was a bad experiment. Since then, we’ve been really good about realizing that certain people have an agenda for what they want to do, and if we don’t fit in, we’re not going to force it.

There has been definite progress. Sixpence None the Richer have started in a much different place. Theirs has been much more a youth-group audience. And now, with their self-titled album, it’s great to see them setting an example that you can move on to more ambitious songwriting, like yours, without sacrificing faith, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

(laughing) If that’s what they’re going to do, then they’ve got their work cut out for them. That was a very special record.

Do you envy the sudden phenomenal success Sixpence have experienced, or do you say to yourself, “There but for the grace of God go I?”

I was basically tickled pink for them. That’s everybody’s dream, especially at their age, to get that kind of attention placed on a song. It opens a door to a whole new level of a career. I don’t particularly envy them the process it took for them to get there…it was grueling. And I don’t envy them the fact that in a lot of ways their life now is not their own, and every nuance of their career will be scrutinized now. I can look back at certain points of my career and if that would have happened then, I would have taken the money and skipped town or self-destructed in various ways. I wouldn’t have had the resources to handle that.

If you could go back and talk to your younger self, back in 1989, and give yourself any messages or any warnings about the road that lay ahead of you, what would you say to yourself? And would your younger self go on ahead anyway?

I don’t think that I could do it again, but I would certainly encourage myself to do it again.

If you really want to do it, you embrace the chaos and don’t look back. When we first started to get [Over the Rhine] off the ground, to the point where we could actually make a living doing it, I said, “Every resource that I can possibly muster, every ounce of personal energy, I want to put in this. If we fail, I want to be destitute, and out on the street with nothing. I don’t want to have a little nest egg set aside that is my safety net for not making it.” It’s been a labor of love, and we’ve never really cashed in, but we’ve had some nice surprises along the way. The madness of four people in a car traveling across the country staying in one hotel room is something I don’t think I could psyche myself up to going back to.

You’ve been touring and singing with the Cowboy Junkies. Has that affected the direction of Over the Rhine’s music?

The Junkies get a lot of flak because they do this dreamy, “torchy”, smoky music. Some people think it’s boring and sleepy, and to others its phenomenally unique and amazing. I see them constantly trying to rock their own boat, trying different things. Some things we’re recording with them for their new record is in almost a Radiohead vein. I want Over the Rhine to do what we do best. Reckless curiosity is important, but it’s more important at the beginning of a journey, and then you want to rein it in and focus it.

Tell me about some of the more recent songs. There’s a lot of sadness in these songs, as you said earlier, and the first song, “Latter Days,” is a heartbreaker.

•

There is a me you would not recognize, dear
Call it the shadow of myself
And if the music starts before I get there
Dance without me
You dance so gracefully
I really think I’ll be okay…

- excerpt from “Latter Days”

•

Where did this song come from?

It’s become an important song for me. It was written in my bedroom, I was just scratching some things down. When it’s happening, you never know at the time that something is going to be that essential to your work. It’s just very informal. And that’s just one of the purest things I’ve ever written.

I was questioning another one of those periods where I felt like I was done with music, that I didn’t have what it took. So the whole bit about “dancing without me” is to other musicians… “You go on ahead and do it. I’ll get there eventually and I’ll be okay.” The lines about, “I just don’t have much left to say”… that’s very literal. “I’m supposed to be writing these songs, but I’ve been dashed on the rocks and I’ve got nothing left.”

It wasn’t too long after Karin’s dad died that I wrote the song. He was really quite known for being a good dancer… he was a Presence. Those two images planted the seeds.

To me, there’s something about that sadness that is ultimately joyful. Some people wouldn’t see it that way. In one of the new songs that I want to record, the first line is “The saddest lines are the happiest, the hardest truths are the easiest.” Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission has this sweet sadness that she carries. Other people have remarked on it. She carried this intense sadness that was so beautiful, and yet when she expresses that and you hear it coming out, it causes me so much joy even though it’s so sad. I guess that mystery, that sweet sadness, is something that fires my imagination.

You try to tell a story on a record. “Latter Days” is the first song on “Good Dog Bad Dog”, but by the second song ["All I Need is Everything"] this person is already starting to realize that this place of brokenness is one of immense strength and renewal. Now that I realize that I’m completely shattered, I’m at a place where good things can happen.

Tell me about the new song “Moth”, from “Amateur Shortwave Radio”.

•

There’s no savior hanging on this cross
It isn’t suffering we fear but loss
When there’s no one else around to blame
You’re a burning moth without a flame
If you were to take my place tonight
See yourself in a different light
If you were to take my face tonight
Wouldn’t Jesus be surprised?

- excerpt from “Moth”

•

Karin wrote the chorus and I wrote the lyric. She came up with “There’s no savior hanging on this cross, it isn’t suffering we fear but loss.”

It really could be a song about an abusive relationship. People are willing to suffer for years in a situation that they know is ultimately destructive because the greater fear is losing it, making a fresh break. But you come to a place where the only redemptive option is to walk away. There’s no savior that can bail you out at this point. “When there’s no one else around to blame…”

In a sense it was a song about the original lineup of the band. We took it as far as we knew how, and in order for any good to come out of the future we need to move on to another situation.

“Faithfully Dangerous” is another intriguing lyric.

•

Your paint dries, the canvas smiles,
with two eyes you lift yourself up.
Stroke your skin, there are teeth marks to be sure.
Maybe we’re best close to the ground.
Maybe angels drag us down.
I wonder which part of this will leave the scar.

- excerpt from “Faithfully Dangerous”

•

I must have written “Faithfully Dangerous” while I was reading The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. She talks about leaving “toothmarks” in manuscripts, and that’s a song to me that’s about creativity. If you do something creative, it’s going to be a wild ride, but make your peace with it. You’ll probably get dragged through the dirt, but maybe that’s good for you.

For me to talk about specific songs is fairly rare. I usually can’t do that too much. Putting the website together [www.overtherhine.com], looking back at our story, at where we’ve come from and where we want to go, I can see where songs fit into the story, but at the time it’s very intuitive.

What do you do to recharge, or when you can’t write?

Reading, maybe just doing nothing for a while. I’ve learned to make peace with that. It’s probably just exhaustion… (laughs) or lack of talent. The ground is just lying fallow.

Your bulletins to fans and the liner notes in your albums demonstrate a love of writing and of poetry. Sometimes I wonder if we’re going to see a book of poetry or memoirs with your name on it.

I’ve been thinking about it, actually. Perhaps when we get to a place where I have some time to focus on something like that…I would very much like to try.