Early in the band’s career, Over the Rhine drafted an intentionally malleable, all-encompassing description of their music — post-nuclear-pseudo-alternative-folk-tinged-art-pop. This playful overview aided the goal of avoiding pigeonholing a group to a sound. It meant something and nothing. Over the past two decades, OtR’s founding members Linford Detweiler and Karin Berquist have unwittingly lived according to that credo, following their muse amidst intimate musical spaces that envelop Americana, pop, jazzy touches and beyond into a niche that’s all their own.
Taking a different approach to every recording in order to make each experience distinctive, the duo brought in producer/musician Joe Henry for their current release, The Long Surrender. Along with special guests including Lucinda Williams and Henry’s son, Levon, the subtly melodic material resembled, sonically, a crackling fireplace spreading warmth throughout a room.
Just as they have maintained control of the creative process, OtR have done the same with the business side of their career. The financing for the recording and release of the new album on its Great Speckled Dog label came about through donations by fans.
Working with a new business model for today’s musicians is just one topic discussed with Linford during a conversation that begins at the beginning of OtR and moves around to “The Long Surrender,” Allen Ginsberg, the stylistic content of the music and longevity as a songwriting, recording, performing (and married) act.
JPG: As far as origins are you from Ohio or did you end up in Cincinnati due to the music scene or college…?
LD: I was born in Hartville Ohio. Actually born in Canton, grew up in Hartville. Karin mostly grew up in Barnsville, which is way southeast down near Wheeling (West Virginia). She was born in California and lived in Phoenix for a few years when she was young. Kind of ended up in Ohio where her family had roots. We were small town Ohio kids. My family did move around a bit. Just for the record, I did come back to college in Canton. That’s where I met Karin at Malone College. Quite the liberal arts college. I ended up migrating towards Cincinnati with some other musicians. There was a little bit of a scene down here. Housing was super cheap at Over the Rhine (Cincinnati neighborhood). Just kind of ended up becoming home.
JPG: That’s interesting because being near the Canton area around that time there were music scenes going on in Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown, and Pittsburgh. When I first heard about Cincinnati band such as you, Afghan Whigs, Ass Ponys and others were you already familiar with things there and you gave it a shot because in your letter at www.overtherhine.com you mentioned about being shocked to be in the middle of the city and all the concrete and few trees.
LD: That was certainly a big change from my past, a family of nature lovers; my little apartment on Main Street in Over the Rhine there. I could see no tree from my apartment but there’s something ragged and beautiful and a little spooky about that neighborhood. It was a bad part of town. Later, after somehow believing that it was the perfect place to start a band, we realized that just four to five blocks from where I lived that Hank Williams recorded “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” They have erected, finally, one of those historical plaques on that street where that studio was. No wonder I was feelin’ it!
Yes, Ass Ponys, Afghan Whigs, there was a little bit of a buzz for some of these bands getting signed to major labels. It was a little all over the map in terms of a scene. There was a lot of live music happening. There was something a little bit dangerous about the alternative music scene that happened in the ‘90s. I think we took that danger and eventually took it to a quiet place. A lot of people took that danger and wanted to make it all about being super loud.
So…I don’t know. I still haven’t quite figured it all out. We had a pretty rich, fertile neighborhood in which to start a band and try our hand at making a few records. We started touring fairly extensively and did about 20-some shows with Adrian Belew before we were signed. Worked our way out in San Francisco opening for him. We got an opportunity to open some dates for Bob Dylan. We even played a couple festivals, and then when we got signed to IRS [records], we hit the ground running pretty hard. But the thing about being part of a scene, if you’re a touring musician, is that you’re never home. In some ways I feel once we really began touring that I did kind of lose that connection a little bit. We’re still friends, some of the guys — Ass Ponys…John Curley (of Afghan Whigs) is still a fairly significant part of the Cincinnati music scene and a producer and a studio owner. RicHordinski, our first guitar player, owns his own studio and is a producer.
JPG: I want to get to The Long Surrender, but since we’ve started this way, let allow it to take its course. Since you mentioned Ric, I interviewed him all those many years ago when you supported the album, Eve. I remember asking him since IRS re-released Patience before Eve came out, which album displayed a truer version of the band. Eve sounded more alt-rock of the day. As he put it, it’s just another different side of the band.
LD: There are two things that I would say in response to that. Even from the very beginning, somehow, we had gotten it into our heads, even with those first few records, that we didn’t want to make the same record over and over again. So, our first record, Till We Have Faces, was a little hard to define. It was a little rough around the edges. Not a loud record, but it was very earthy. Had a little bit of… a little bit of an alt-country influence. Patience was a lush record. It was a little bit more about Karin’s vocals, a little bit about the three-dimensional stuff that Ric was starting to do with his guitar playing. And then Eve, we had been playing a lot of clubs, and a lot of beer bottles breaking. One response to that is to just turn the amps up. ‘You have to pay attention to what we’re doing.’ Another response, which we found out later was just to get absolutely quiet, and actually getting absolutely quiet can very quickly change a room and bring people into our evolution, which was called Good Dog Bad Dog. The record that came out after Eve, we had left IRS records. They let us out of our deal shortly before the label was shutdown. They were one of the early casualties of major labels consolidations.
I think IRS got subsumed into the EMI world. Everything was shutdown. People went home and all of a sudden there wasn’t an IRS records anymore. Kind of alarming. Kind of one of the red flags, what is going on in these major corporations that aren’t even necessarily connected to music in any way, what’s going on with them buying record companies and…
Anyway, we had this collection of demos, which was very quiet, a quiet personal collection of songs that we produced independently after we left IRS. That little independent record outsold all three IRS records combined. It taught Karin and I that it’s really not about the music industry at the end of the day. It’s about the songs. It’s about the recordings, what kind of connections people are making with the songs. Everything changed. We were starting to find something that sells was authentic to who we are. Even if it was out of step with the times, there’s a tremendous confidence and energy that comes with, ‘This is who I am and I’ll take whatever it comes because this is what I’ve got.’ We had some stores swing pretty wide open after we released “Good Dog Bad Dog.” Ended up touring with Cowboy Junkies for a few years. They were very much kindred spirits. Just really began finding, I think, our true audience and that audience since then has been incredibly tuned in and incredibly respectful of whatever that authentic thing is.
JPG: Now, you just didn’t go with releasing your albums on your own label but you took that to another level with a different business model, by having your audience fund the making of The Long Surrender.
LD: Well, the traditional model, of course, is to borrow some money from the record label and make the record and then pay the money back with really horrendous terms. And traditionally, after you were done paying off the record label, they own the music. I think everybody realizes that model has imploded and the music industry has devoured itself from the top down. I guess one alternative approach is not an idea that we came up with is rather than borrowing the money, why not just let people that love your music come in on the front end and make the record with you. When we had the opportunity to record with Joe Henry it felt a little bit like an adventure was unfolding. We were very excited about this opportunity. We wanted people that were interested to be able to come along in real time and be surprised along with us. Whatever might happen.
JPG: I want to get to Joe Henry in a second. But first, on one of the CD booklets it has everybody’s name, thanking them. Was it just a matter of telling them, ‘If you really like our music pay for the album now. Trust us.’ or was it, ‘Give anything you can’ or…
LD: We tried to be somewhat playful about it and we said, ‘You know, if it works for you to donate $15 on the front end, we’ll make sure you get your CD a few months before it actually comes out in record stores and we’ll include a few extra songs at that time that you can download that are not on the record.’ Then, it went up to $50. We said, ‘If you have $50 to spare, we’ll send you immediately all the demos we’ve recorded for the record. If you’ve got $100, we’ll send you the deluxe box set version of the record with an expanded booklet and extras etc.’ We just kept going and we said, ‘If you have $10,000 we’ll play you a private concert and we’ll have Michael Wilson, an amazing photographer who happens to be based in Cincinnati whose work is all over record covers in a lot of amazing places, we’ll have him hand print four archival prints for you and sign them. We’ll hand write the lyrics out for you and sign them etc.’ Well, sure enough some couple in Austin, Texas that we’ve never met sent 10 grand. They said, ‘We’ve got this barn. When it makes sense we’re going to have you come down and play for us and our friends.’ Sort of depending on what people had and what they wanted to do, we tried to make sure they got their money’s worth.
JPG: I see. It’s almost getting like the PBS telethon, where you get a gift bag and then better goods according to how much you donate.
LD: Yeah, we did realize there was an NPR vibe to it.
JPG: In the end that’s a really nice one-to-one interaction between artist and audience.
LD: Yeah, it just really eliminates the middle man. It was surprising to us, but if you grow up around music and recording you tend to…this is what you do. But there were a lot of people that were writing about how exciting this was. They’ve never gotten to actually help make a record, be part of the whole thing unfolding from the demos to which songs actually get picked for the record to the way it sounds, looks. They seemed to really love the idea of actually getting to make it.
JPG: Lots of bands have very dedicated fans, but in your case because you’re a band that has, I won’t say a specific sound, a special sound, a very intimate sound, a very inviting one to one particular mentality that it probably does elicit more of a devotion, dedication and interest. Prior to bring up this idea to fan, you had chosen Joe Henry as the album’s producer. What did you hope that he was going to bring to the proceedings and what did he bring to “The Long Surrender?”
LD: We had loved Joe’s songwriting for years and thought that it occupied a unique place on the record shelf. When he had Ornette Coleman sit in on one of his songs, I thought that was one of the more interesting moments in pop music of the decade. But then Joe Henry as a producer, when he made the Solomon Burke record and started making these interesting records, we sat up and began paying attention. He had made a mostly instrumental record with Allen Touissant called The Bright Mississippi. I don’t know for some reason that record kind of put us over the edge. We got to thinking, ‘Wow! What would happen if we were able to make a record with Joe producing?’ The exciting thing was I couldn’t figure out what that would mean for Over the Rhine. I couldn’t hear the record in advance. That seemed really exciting.
Joe, I think his gift is figuring out which musicians need to be in the room together, and then once he figures that out everybody plays together. It’s very much about capturing a moment and what happens to the song when this particular group plays them. We started on a Monday afternoon and wrapped the following Friday. Always ended in time for a sitdown evening meal together. The great players that he called in, it was like leaning into a really good dancing partner, to make the songs feel like they were drifting out to sea or they were being put on a train. All of a sudden, it was this world that you wanted to enter. It takes a pretty special producer to be able to make it about the right musicians in the room and capturing a moment. We just surrendered and enjoyed the ride.
JPG: When one sits down to listen to the album, it has one of those things that you rarely get anymore, and that is open spaces in the production.
LD: Yeah.
JPG: And I thought it was an interesting line that’s in the CD booklet, the very last line about, ‘For best results: surrender 55 minutes of your life to the songs in full sequence/real time,’ which is necessary. Just out of curiosity, are you not much of an iTunes type where someone pulls a track or two from an album whereas you think more, creatively, as a full album?
LD: Yeah, it’s more about the complete picture for me. I still believe in the idea of the longplaying record album (slight laugh). You enter the world and, hopefully, you emerge from it in a slightly different place. I was thinking that that’s the exception to the rule. Maybe, we’re trying to make records for exceptional people, I don’t know. But, when Joe sequenced the record, it felt to me like I was being invited to come along. It just felt, again, like something was in real time. I’m sure you can go and pull different songs off the record and, hopefully, find a way in pretty much at any place on the record if you want to do that, but it is a slightly different experience just to make a space to take in the whole picture.
JPG: In doing the research for this I read about the jazzy feel to Karin’s vocals but much more than that I noticed a swing feel to the music and the songs, even back on 2007’s The Trumpet Child. Is it something that correlates with what you talked about earlier, not wanting to make the same record again, that caused you to add a little more swing to the songwriting and performance?
LD: From the very beginning when Karin first started opening her mouth and leaning towards a microphone, there was always a certain amount of people who were interested in the torch song quality of what she did. There was a torchi-ness. (slight laugh) And, I guess, later, I just realized it was referring mostly to American music before the era of rock ‘n’ roll, just all that great music that was happening. With The Trumpet Child we tried to intentionally draw from that pre-rock ‘n’ roll era and let it come forward into what we were doing.
So, we were messing around with some horns and strings, more playful rhymes in the songs [on “The Long Surrender”]. I think Karin was vocally being a bit more playful at times. So yeah, I think you’re picking up on something that’s definitely in there. A few songs are structured somewhat like standards – “There’s a Bluebird in my Heart” that Karen wrote. We’re certainly not trying to make jazz records or I don’t think we’re jazz musicians but on the other hand there is room for improvisations in our arrangements and there is a place where every time we play the song it’s slightly different.
JPG: That’s why I like using the word ‘swing’ as opposed to ‘jazz.’ I learned that from Michelle Shocked years ago when we were discussing how her music had a sense of swing to it. Speaking of descriptive phrases, I found this self-description from early in your career. See if this still applies or maybe you’ll just get a good laugh out of it. You dubbed yourselves ‘post-nuclear-pseudo-alternative-folk-tinged-art-pop.’ I guess you could now add ‘with some swing.’
LD: (laughs) I was trying to be clever, but also just trying to encourage people just to listen to the music.
JPG: Trying to stay away from an actual description but give something to chew on. As far as something else on the new album that’s has a swing feel to it. I thought when listening to “The King Knows How,” ‘You know, that wouldn’t be so out of place on a Tom Waits record.’
LD: Hey, alright.
JPG: Going back to vocals what was it about that number that you joined Karin on that one?
LD: Karin and I have been doing just a little more harmony singing together. There were actually a couple of demos where we had sung harmony that didn’t make this particular record. But, that’s a really good question.
JPG: Stumped you.
LD: I have no idea, why that one and not some other one.
JPG: Was that a suggestion from Joe? ‘Linford, get in there.’
LD: No, that’s the way we demoed the song. I think she and I were just fooling around with some harmonies and somebody said why don’t I try singing lead and Karin can sing the harmony. Just kind of where it was sitting in our voices, it would be a little more interesting that way. We just went with it. It was a fairly personal song that I wrote. I had actually written it probably in the late ‘90s and then pulled it out for this project, and re-worked it a little bit. There was, maybe, one of the riskier, more vulnerable moments in the writing, and there’s something about the two voices that helps the song feel risky.
JPG: Besides hearing your vocals so upfront in the mix, another surprise was the sax break at the end of “All My Favorite People” because that just comes in there from out of nowhere yet the way it’s played just fits perfectly.
LD: Not bad for an 18 year old, huh? That’s Levon Henry, Joe’s son playing sax. If you divide the record into three acts, he kind of comes in the third act, mysteriously appears. I see him as some sort of Guardian Angel, a late appearing presence on the record. Levon’s a pretty special musician. He plays way beyond his years. He’s studying tenor sax at the New School in New York. Already playing with a lot of great players. He’s pretty special. We were thrilled to discover that he was actually going to be around while we were making The Long Surrender. So, we got him down into the basement for two songs.
JPG: When you say three acts on the album, what are we are talking about, track one “Laugh of Recognition” until what would be first act? And then what would be…
LB: I haven’t really thought of…
JPG: You set me up, sorry.
LD: Just kind of a rough way of organizing the record, but somehow…like when we get to “There’s a Bluebird in My Heart,” I kind of see that as Act Three.
JPG: What starts act two then?
LD: I guess Act Two for me would probably start with “Infamous Love Song.” Lucinda Williams on “Undamned” kind of brings that part of the record to a close.
JPG: It’s funny you brought up “Infamous Love Song,” because it has my favorite line from the album, “I sing the bebop apocalypse.’ That might make sense if I think about it long and hard or smoke a lot of weed or something like that. I just like the way it rolls off the tongue, which may be its only intent.
LD: Well, you nailed the era because that’s a tip of the hat to Allen Ginsburg and the poem, “Howl.” The poem he just says, ‘Holy the ___’ and he fills in the blank over and over and over again, and one of the lines was, ‘Holy the bop apocalypse.’ For some reason when I saw that, ‘the bop apocalypse’, I was with you, I just loved the sound of it. And I remember closing the book and walking out on our porch and I just started scribbling, ‘I sing/The bebop apocalypse/Lean into you/God’s hands on my hips/Grip the midnight microphone.’ These words just started spilling out and I got probably about 80 per cent of the song fairly quickly. It took me about six months of hard work for the last 20 per cent. That’s the thing about Allen Ginsberg’s writing, there’s something very…what’s that called when you have, oh, contagious. There’s something very contagious about it. It’s almost like it gets on your skin and it starts getting…so, anyway, I’m glad that popped out because I love that poem. There were about four different poets that got referenced on The Long Surrender.
JPG: I know that there was B.H. Fairchild that Karen used in “Rave On.”
LB: He’s great, and Charles Bukowski. “There’s a Bluebird in My Heart,” there’s a line from one of his poems.
JPG: You make me want to dig around and find my copy of “Howl” after discussing it.
LB: Yeah, check it out. That last section, even if you just read the last section.
JPG: Staying with “Infamous Love Song,” going back to your letter on the band’s website you mentioned about your father pulling the car to the side of the road to admire a deciduous tree, and then the line ‘Deciduous trees’ comes up in that number. Was that an unconscious connection for you?
LB: Well, I buried my dad a couple of years ago. The family called upon me to write his obituary. So, it still looms fairly large. Passed away unexpectedly, and it always feels like there’s a few missing pages from that last chapter when somebody dies unexpectedly. So, I’m sure, as I toss up things, what he loved, sort of what he passed on to me that it probably shows up all over the place. We brought it all the way back around to the trees and Over the Rhine and there weren’t any, and I was making a run for it man. I was getting out. (laughs)
JPG: Well, you did. You live on a farm now.
LD: Yeah, well I came back around, which we often do. But, Karin and I, we ended up buying a piece of land, an old pre-Civil War farmhouse in Southern Ohio. Retreat when we get off the road. Got a place where we can wander around at night. If one is prone to night walking. We can actually see the sky properly. Take a deep breath and disappear for awhile.
JPG: Do you think, and first off I don’t want to avoid this, my sympathies in regard to the loss of your father, that by moving to the farmhouse and also the idea that it’s just you and Karin, the chemistry between you as songwriters, performers, husband and wife, do you think that’s what helped to keep Over the Rhine going for 20 years?
LD: Yeah, I suppose. Some people would argue that it’s a potential liability to start a band with your partner or in the words of Karin…we were leading a workshop one time at a songwriting conference. So, we came up with these 10 things that every songwriter should know. Karin went first and she said, ‘Number one, don’t ever start a band with your fuckin’ wife.’ I suppose the risk there is if the marriage implodes does it take everything else down with it. And we’ve had our moments where we weren’t sure how it was all going to shake down. Somehow, we’ve pressed through and tried to learn how to take care of both our marriage and our musical collaboration. It’s not for the faint of heart but we have lived to tell about it.
JPG: Are you surprised that you have been around for two decades and still going forward.
LD: (laughs)
JPG: I mean, I remember as a kid when you saw a band, whether it was Led Zeppelin or whatever, to make it to 10 years, that seemed like a long time. And now, you’re dealing with two decades.
LD: Well, I told my parents once I always thought that I would pick up the phone and call them and say, ‘Mom, dad, I’ve got some news. It’s a little bit bittersweet. I think you’ll be happy to know that as far as Over the Rhine goes, we’ve packed it in. The band is no more. I’m going to be getting back to my real life now and getting a job and moving forward.’ I always thought I would pick up the phone and make that call at some point. And then, not too long before my dad died, I realized, ‘Wow, I’m never going to make that call. I think this is just what I do. This is my real life. Wow!’ So yeah, it is kind of surprising.
