Over The Rhine: heartfelt

Over The Rhine
The Music Mill
Saturday, May 28

In the early ’90s, Stevo Glendinning of IRS Records came to Cincinnati to sign Over the Rhine. It didn’t take long for Over the Rhine to become the darlings of a lot of rock critics. Fifteen years and almost as many releases later, they’re still in search of that breakout song that can catapult them from the critics’ “best of” lists and into the public consciousness.

Over the Rhine consist of the husband and wife team Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist and has toured as the opening act for such artists as Bob Dylan and Adrian Belew. They’ll appear at the Music Mill on May 28 in support of their newest release, Drunkard’s Prayer.

After 11 albums, one wonders if the band has any inner demons left to exorcise.

“When we were writing Ohio we felt like we were coming out of our introspective shells as writers, and beginning to engage more with what was going on around us,” Detweiler said. “There were a couple of songs on Ohio that were arguably protest songs. Then we went through some intense stuff with our personal lives and so we went back to square one with Drunkard’s Prayer. We used the recording of the album to help us process all that while we were moving forward. So, it’s a very personal record for us.”

In the liner notes on Drunkard’s Prayer, Detweiler writes about reconnecting as a couple and rediscovering each other.

“It’s hard to be away from home all the time,” he said. “We have a great time on the road, but it’s always with a group of six or eight people. It becomes difficult to get that time away from everyone else to connect as a couple. I feel like after all this time, we’re getting the road figured out at this point, but it’s still hard to live with having a suitcase packed and ready to go all the time.”

What makes for better songwriting, sorrow and melancholy or joy and laughter?

He said, “I wrote a line onetime that went, ‘The saddest songs are the happiest, the hardest truths are the easiest.’ When you’re extremely happy tears well up. When you’re extremely sad tears well up. To me the two are connected. When I hear an achingly beautiful Tom Waits song that should make me feel sad as all get out, I still can feel this intense joy at the beauty of it.”

The duo has been open about their spirituality. Ohio and Drunkard’s Prayer are rife with religious symbolism, yet neither is really overtly gospel or contemporary Christian albums.

“We weren’t that intentional about it,” he said. “But we both grew up in the Protestant Church. We met at a Quaker college. Our songs are just our way of thinking that out through our music. But I think all great songwriters go there. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen or whomever; they all go there. Even graffiti on the cave wall is about ‘Who are we? Why are we here? What’s it all about? How do we deal with the dark side of our existence?’

“To me it’s just completely natural that it seeps into some of our songwriting. At the same time though I don’t think we’d last a minute in the Christian music industry.”