by kellie abrahamson kabrahamson1@aol.com
What: Over the Rhine
Where: Café Eleven in St. Augustine Beach (501 A1A Beach Blvd)
When: January 29th at 8:30 pm
The Ohio-based husband and wife team of Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler, better known as Over the Rhine, have been making music since 1989 with no end in sight. In 2007 the duo released three albums, started their own label and crisscrossed the country bringing their latest record (number 17 in their discography, 20 if you count solo albums), The Trumpet Child, to life for their dedicated fans. EU recently caught up with Linford who was kind enough to tell us about the new CD, the band’s live show and their plans for the New Year.
EU: Each of your records tells a story or has a theme. What’s the story or theme in The Trumpet Child?
Linford Detweiler: Well, a couple of things. First of all, Karin was fond of saying that we had sort of cornered the market on melancholy with some of our previous releases so she wanted to try to bottle some joy on The Trumpet Child, do something a little bit more playful, a little bit more whimsical… We also wanted to reference a pre-Rock and Roll era of American music somewhat on the project – sort of a Golden Age of American songwriting. You know, the Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin era where they were being a little bit more playful with the language in the songs and the instrumentation was a little bit more unpredictable than maybe a lot of modern pop records, with horns and strings and clarinets. So we wanted the occasional clarinet blowing through the songs, you know? And, finally, I think we wanted to show a little bit of solidarity with the musicians that had survived the whole Katrina debacle. We wanted a little bit of a New Orleans feel with some of the horns and things on the record and hopefully some of that came through on the project.
EU: What’s your songwriting process like?
LD: It seems like we don’t plan it this much on most projects, but it works out where Karin writes about a third of the songs, I write about a third of the songs and then we collaborate on the remaining third. It seems like, when we add them up, it’s almost always that way, but it’s not anything that we really think about. It’s great to have a writing partner as a kind of foil, someone to bounce ideas off of and someone to tell you that it’s really not very good [laughs] and it needs to be better. That’s helpful. It seems like we’ve gotten a few records under our belts at this point, I think probably close to twenty CDs, I’ve lost count… Gosh, it’s scary but we’re seventeen or eighteen years into a recording career now, so it seems like at this stage lyrics are the hardest because it’s hard to not repeat yourself. After you’ve written a few hundred songs or whatever it seems like the stuff that wanted to come out has sort of come out so sometimes you tend to go back to what you care about but realize, “Wait, I’ve already written this song.” I think a lot of times the music will sort of lead the way and the lyrics tend to get finished up last.
EU: I’ve heard that working with a spouse day in and day out can be a challenge. Have you found that to be the case?
LD: I think as far as the working relationship, musically we’ve always had pretty good chemistry. It’s always been pretty interesting when we put our heads together musically. I think otherwise we would have lost interest at some point and moved on but it’s still something that’s kind of unpredictable and we feel like there’s good synergy there where the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, if that’s what I’m trying to say. But, yeah, it’s a challenge. I think the biggest challenge for us was just learning how to balance a relationship with the working relationship because earlier in our career if we were putting a lot of energy together into our work it sort of felt like, “Yeah, we’re together all the time, we’re working closely together, we’re traveling together,” but it’s not the same as investing in a relationship and nurturing a relationship, apart from the work. So that’s probably been the biggest challenge for us, just sort of making room for both of the relationships and taking care of both of them.
EU: What is a typical Over the Rhine show like? What can people expect?
LD: Well, we’ve got a wonderful band touring with us. We’ve been blessed with really world-class musicians. Our drummer’s name is Mickey Grimm and our upright bass player and guitar player is Jake Bradley and they really are exceptional players. People will have a lot of fun just seeing a really great band. We feel really privileged that so many good musicians are willing to come out with us and help our songs sort of blossom. I think [during] the live shows there’s a little bit more of sort of a reckless unpredictability to them to a certain extent. Karin really tends to blow the roof off a dump, she really doesn’t hold back vocally. People are usually blown away by the soulfulness and the power of her voice. It’s a little bit of a different experience than the recording studio… In some ways she is sort of a soul singer in my opinion because she kind of shoves it all out there, she doesn’t hold back and sort of wears her heart on her sleeve. It’s not a cool delivery or anything like that. And I’ve been known to sort of pick a rabbit trail and ramble for a while, tell some meandering stories [laughs]. Hopefully it’s just a really rich evening of music and storytelling for people.
EU: Do you have a favorite song to play live?
LD: That’s a good question. Maybe a favorite song on The Trumpet Child for me would be the title track. Some people have called it a jazz hymn and I really like that description of the song. It was a song that sort of pushed us musically into a slightly different territory and it’s been a fun song to play.
EU: It seems like you guys were really busy last year. What are Over the Rhine’s plans for 2008?
LD: It won’t be quite as busy on the touring front but we’ll be playing more festivals and it’ll be fairly steady. I think we’re going to spend some more time with this music before we move on. We’re still very excited about all these new songs. We’ll be touring over most of the US throughout the year. We do a Christmas tour every December and this December for the first time we’re going to take it out to the West Coast and do Seattle down through LA so that’ll be a first. We also hope to play the Lincoln Center in New York for the first time for the Christmas show. We’re just sort of lifers, you know? We write songs and that’s what we do. We won’t be reinventing the wheel or anything but we’re looking forward to it.
Make the drive out to St. Augustine Beach for this promising Café Eleven show. Tickets are only $12. For more information, call (904) 460-9311 or visit cafe11.com.
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