Over the Rhine

Twenty years in, Linford Detweiler feels at ease in his artistic clothes. For good reason, since the Cincy resident’s melodies and lyrics are both best described as poetic. Along with the sonically seductive Karin Bergquist, Over the Rhine’s piano player draws the listener with compelling lines that strike the heart and the mind – their back catalog, an impossible-to-decide-which-one’s-my-favorite list of one masterstroke after another.

Celebrating their two-decade anniversary all through the year, Detweiler took some time away from writing The Trumpet Child’s follow-up to reflect a moment about what makes his parents proud, what makes him proud and where they go from here.

SSv: This is the 20 year mark for you two, so that seems a good place to start. How much reflection do you do over the lifespan of the band at this point?

Linford Detweiler: I don’t make a habit of reflecting back or conjuring nostalgia as a general rule. [Laughs] But this is our twentieth anniversary so I do find myself panning back and thinking about the big picture. We did a reunion concert with Rich Hordinski and Brian Kelley – the original co-founding members of the band. We hadn’t played with them in close to a decade or more – more in the case for Rich. I think it really sunk it that it had been 20 years. When you walk into a rehearsal space and roll out those early songs, something sinks in.

So I have been reflecting somewhat and I think it’s been showing up in the songwriting we’ve been doing for the next project. It’s your garden variety questions of “what have you done for the last 20 years? Did any of it matter? Why are we still doing this?” [Laughs] Stuff like that.

SSv: How do you answer questions like that at this stage?

Linford: I feel a certain inevitability about what happens. I love a line in an old Maria McKey song called “Dixie Storms.” She says, ‘When a big city beckons, you have no choice but to go.’ I also feel that in regard to sort of being young and feeling the tug of songwriting and being in a band. You sort of have a choice, but you sort of don’t. [Laughs] If it gets in your blood, you just have to set out on a little adventure to see what happens before you get on with the rest of your life. Somewhere along the line in the case of Karen and I, we realized we were never going to get on with the rest of our lives – that music was sort of at the center of our life’s work. So we learned to accept that.

I remember my parents weren’t famous for coming to our shows. In fact, the only time they saw an Over the Rhine show with the full band was in late 2007 and it turned out that it was shortly before my father passed away. It seemed that he had a sixth sense for really finishing unfinished business in his final lap. [Laughs] I mean, the night before he died, he wrote and mailed postcards to quite a few of his grandchildren. He died suddenly. He took a bike ride that morning even. He had ordered seeds for his garden a few days before. So there were a lot of things he chose to do in his final days with a lot of significance.

So they came to this concert and I remember saying from the stage, ‘No parent has children and secretly hopes they will start a band.’ [Laughs] I said, ‘I always assumed a day would come when I would call mom and dad and say, ‘Hey, I got good news. It’s a little bittersweet, but Over the Rhine… we’ve packed it in. It’s no more. So I’m going back to school to get a real job and you’ll sort of know what to say when people ask what I do.’ [Laughs] But then I just said, ‘But I realize that the phone call is never going to happen and this is pretty much it.’

SSv: When did you first realize the music was that centerpiece?

Linford: Some people talk about a spiritual journey as something big that goes down all at once where something shifts and everything is different forever. Other people describe it as something that happens a little bit every day, where almost every day you decide to continue your spiritual path or not. I sort of feel we’ve been in the second category somewhat when it comes to music, although I guess there has been some seismic shifts as well in our thinking through important things that happened to us that confirm we’re on the right path.

But it’s something we continue to question. I think with every record, there’s a little bit of a haunting that you have. ‘Am I still able to write? Is what I’m writing worth putting out there and bothering people with?’ So there’s an ongoing process. We want to make sure that we’re connected in some significant way to what we’re doing and not just going through the motions and not just trying to make a living or whatever.

SSv: I love those questions that you say you ask yourself with each record. But have those questions changed over time – the ones you ask yourself when you’re ready to record?

Linford: That’s a great question. [Pause] Yeah. [Laughs] Early on, you’re asking questions like, ‘Where am I going to record this music? How can I afford that? How do you do album artwork?’ It’s a lot more questions of survival and getting your name out and trying to make a splash. It’s really not so much, believe it or not, in the early stages about what we’re trying to do with this music. It’s not about what songs you want to write or what you’re good at.

Later on, it becomes much more content driven – ‘what am I saying and why am I saying this?’ Again with so many people making music and with so many doing pretty good work, I think this came through on the first track on The Trumpet Child about not wanting to waste people’s time with music that isn’t real and honest and raw. I just really don’t want to clog up the airwaves with yet another record. I want it to be something I believe in some level.

SSv: You talk about keeping it interesting for the sake of your audience, but I wonder about the opposite. Were there seasons in the last 20 years where you just weren’t interested anymore?

Linford: Yeah, we’ve definitely had our dry spells. You go through the rigors of touring where you physically or emotionally or mentally or even spiritually get worn down. You can lose the plot, you know? Not to say that when you actually walk on stage in front of the audience, quite often some small miracle happens and you’re able to get caught up in what’s happening. But the traveling and being away from home and the intense community of the road can be exhausting. I think probably those have been those moments – coming off of extensive periods of touring – have been seasons that require that recovery time where you feel you have not a whole lot to offer creatively. [Laughs]

I guess we’ve always felt pretty driven. We’ve always felt like we have music that we want to sink our teeth into. So I would say that we’ve been blessed for the most part with the desire to get out there and do it. Then we’ve also been blessed, to come from the other direction, with people who care what’s happening musically. In small ways and creative ways, the people who find the music do put their own energy into it. I think that energy helps give the songs a life. We are sort of indebted to our listeners. They very much help perpetuate our music as well.

SSv: When you look back at the albums overall, are you pretty critical of our own work? Do you enjoy it as the progression that it is? Is it both of those?

Linford: I think it’s all of the above. It’s maybe harder for Karen as the singer to go back to some of the early work. I think singing and especially the way Karen sings is pretty intimate. I think she feels a little naked sometimes going back to some of the early recordings where she was figuring out what she could do, what she wanted to do. I certainly am aware that when I do have the occasion to back to a record, it’s shortcomings and flaws are pretty apparent to me, but I think I’ve grown more accepting of the journey part of it.

The reality is that we made the best records we knew how to make at the time. We always set out to do our best work. We fell short, but that doesn’t make it invalid. I see it as sort of a flawed body of work, very much like any human life or my story with its flaws and moments of stumbling and whatever. I just see it as something that’s real and somewhat broken but hopefully it all sort of hangs together.

SSv: Does that mean you’re proudest of the most recent offerings?

Linford: I’m actually most proud of our tenacity. [Laughs] It’s just the fact that we’ve hung in there. We’ve lost record deals. We’ve taken record deals. Sometimes we’ve said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ That’s where we are now. We’re just happy to put out our own records and keep it pretty close to home.

I read this little story in a book called Art and Fear recently where a professor was teaching a ceramics course…

SSv: I just read that, I think. By Ted Orland and David Bayles?

Linford: Yeah, Karen’s been reading it and I’ve been peeking over her shoulder. You’ve read it then?

SSv: Yeah, about three months ago.

Linford: Remember that anecdote in there about the ceramics professor that divided the class in half? He said to the first half they would graded on the quality of their work. He said they should really focus on sticking to a design and perfecting it because it was going to be all about quality. The other half was going to be graded on the quantity of their work. So they were going to take all their ceramics pieces at the end of the semester and put them on the scale and weigh them. That would determine their grade – the sheer amount of time you put in and the weight of it.

I feel like I’m proud of the fact that regardless of what was going on in our career, we found ways to put out records. When you put them all on the scale, I feel like we’ve really put in some hours. We’ve learned some of the craft of what it takes to make a recording. I’m glad we took that approach instead of waiting for the perfect record deal or the great producer or whatever. We just kind of cranked it out.

Now the end of that anecdote is that the students that just cranked it out did the best work. So I think there’s something there. This message is coming to me from a lot of different places. It’s the new Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers…

SSv: The “10,000 Hours” chapter?

Linford: Yeah, that’s it. I think it’s just coming down more to that idea that we’ve put in our hours, we’ve done our part and the rest of it has a way of taking on a life of its own. But if you’re not willing to put in the time as a writer or artist, the chances are slim if you’re not showing up.

SSv: So Gladwell’s premise feels true to you?

Linford: I think so. There are some highly publicized exceptions of people that are just born with this crazy receptor quality. There’s just something vibrating in them from the beginning. But the people who have the most talent or are the most intelligent, there’s not really a direct correlation to people like that succeeding in what they want to do versus the people who are willing to put in the time and really hone a craft and make mistakes and learn as they go.

SSv: You brought up being in the songwriting season, so can you tell us about that? How far into it are you?

Linford: I probably have about three dozen songs in various states of disrepair. Karen has about the same. There’s lots of unfinished ideas or a chorus here and there. In some cases, a song is pretty complete. But we’re just at a phase where we sort of need to start putting our heads together now and come up for air and see what we’ve got. So I guess we’re getting ready to enter our co-writing phase where we each look at the others work where we get in there and start finishing things.

I feel I’ve worked pretty hard to try and write at least a little bit every day. I’ve been surprised a few times that it was slow going at first. We did a songwriting cruise with John Hiatt and various others earlier this spring and John was talking about the fact that when he sits down to write a song, it’s not untypical for him to sit and stare at the point of a pen as if it’s this exotic instrument and think, ‘Okay, wait, how do I write a song? How does this work?’ [Laughs]

Just because you’ve written a handful of songs doesn’t mean that you feel that you know what you’re doing. So I think we’re both wandering around in the wilderness a little bit. But I think there’s a plot beginning to take shape. Once we finish the songs, I think the songs will point the way toward the kind of record we want to make.

*Top illustration by Jason Horning, side watercolor by Danny Jock.

Related posts:

1. Over The Rhine
2. Over the Rhine – Live @ Taft Theatre

Tagged as: Cincinnati