Story by Meridith DeAvila – Photos Courtesy of Jill Nance
The Birchmere in Alexandra, Virginia, is one of those grease-slicked, rock-n-roll tough places. Hidden off the road, the Birchmere looks like a bowling alley attacked by a rock-lovin’ graffitti artist. Inside, pool hall meets square dance venue, complete with a Marilyn Monroe animated neon light that starts flickering midway through the interview.

Tonight, Over the Rhine will cram onto the small stage set in the center of a mess hall– doors open two hours before the show to allow concert goers to dine on cajun gumbo, chicken pot pie or “Extra Good Pizza.” But right now, it’s mid-afternoon and Linford Detweiler and I are sitting at one of the dimly lit tables.

“Trumpet Child” is getting fabulous reviews, so congratulations. I’ve heard some people comment that it’s jazzier which is fantastic, but that the angst of Over the Rhine has shifted.

Yeah that was intentional. “Drunkard’s Prayer” was a very intimate, vulnerable record. “Ohio” was a record where we really explored our musical roots, sort of American roots music and it was also, I don’t know, the war was starting and I don’t know if it was a phase of life but I was thinking a lot about how we all have an expiration date, and just sort of relatively short time we have as humans to figure stuff out and work out relationships, and so we were getting into some fairly, we were asking some big questions on “Ohio,” for sure, as well, and it just felt like it was time to throw a little bit of a musical party. We wanted the feel of it to be about people gathering together in the same room and sort of laughing and conversation and something unfolding, so we wanted people to feel that lightness. I always say that melancholy comes easy for writers and joy is a little bit tricker to figure out, convincingly, so we wanted to get some joy on this project that felt authentic.

I just sort of went to the piano and started figuring stuff out. – Linford Detweiler

Drunkard’s Prayer was recorded almost entirely in your living room. Is that where you love playing music, where you find your inspiration?

It’s really great to make music at home, in the rooms where you wake up every day and walk around every day. There’s just something about making music at home where it feels like you’re standing fully in your shoes, you know, there aren’t a lot of distractions. It just feels real and close. For “The Trumpet Child,” then, we did make that in Nashville with a producer.

If you had your choice of the two methods, which would you choose?

Well, basically we wanted to make this record in Nashville because we knew we wanted to invite some horn players and string players and have some clarinets on the record and when we decided to work with Brad Jones, we knew that he had access to sort of a talent pool there that was real close at hand, and so we opted to sort of hunker down and work in an environment that was familiar to him with this sort of odd array of musicians nearby that we could draw from. We did, however, bring several of the songs back to the farm to have Karin sing the final vocals at home, because again there was just something about the way she sings at home that we feel something a little different.

You are a musician and a writer. Which came first for you?

Definitely the music. The piano was sort of where I went as a child to figure stuff out, and to kind of get at things that I didn’t have words for. I guess I just wanted a piano so badly. My parents were both raised on an Amish farm, no electricity, no automobiles, no radio. And so when they left their Amish communities and sort of struck out into the world to sort of figure it out, it was a big deal to bring musical instruments into the home. For whatever reason, that wasn’t accepted. So when we brought this piano right into the house, that was a big deal. My cousin Serena in Iowa wanted a piano, and she had to keep hers in the chicken house, she wasn’t allowed to bring it right into the regular house, that was a compromise they made. So I would play my cousin Serena’s piano in Iowa and there would be a Rhode Island Red roosting two octaves above middle C. [laughs] My sister Grace, who was a few years older than me and much wiser than I, she was concerned that my grandmother was coming to visit and would see this piano in the house and would be mortified–I don’t know why it was such a big deal–but my sister Grace, she was probably 8 or 9 at the time, she was eyeing this piano and decided if we covered it up just right, my grandmother would think it was a furnace.

And she also said–I just sort of went to the piano and started figuring stuff out.

So you’re self taught?

I did eventually take lessons, but at first it was just about improvising and just letting music come out, but [my sister Grace] explained to me, again as an 8 or 9 year old, that I basically had two options as a piano player: I could play the music that we were growing up with in church, the old hymns and things, or I could be what was called a concert pianist, which meant that I would play the piano for silent movies. So I was really intrigued by this idea of playing the piano for silent movies as a boy, but I hadn’t seen any because we didn’t have TV or anything. [laughs] So I kinda lost interest in classical music later in life when I realized they weren’t making silent films anymore.

That sounds like a project for your new endeavor…I’m sure there’s a filmmaker out there.

There you go. Yeah. Thank you for that.

Which comes first: the melody or the words?

I think a lot of times, it seems like, that’s a good question–it happens all different ways. Sometimes there’s just a little musical idea that just grabs you by the hand and takes you somewhere. A lot of times there will be one line that you overhear, and you think, wow, we could hang a song on that. A song that both Karin and I are working on–we can’t remember who said this, but we said, one of us said, “all my favorite people are broken.” Immediately, sometimes a line will have a certain weight, so when I hear that line, music just comes rushing in behind it. And then the words, as far as writing the verses and figuring out where to go with that, that’s usually the hardest part, and that part requires more time. I think that music is a great way to take power away from people that have too much and to give power to people that have too little, and I think as far as religion, music is a great way for people that are very wrapped up in the church and are comfortable with that culture, I think music–like my music, I would hope, would make them a little uncomfortable, would gently push them out of their comfort zone where they had to engage in a new way with some spiritual question. At the same time, people that maybe aren’t interested, or maybe don’t think about where they are spiritually, I would hope that they’d be in a bar or something hearing our songs and something would sort of start to twitch and moan a little bit, in terms of their spiritual curiosity. And so for some people…our stuff might have been too strong, but for somebody else it might have been so obviously spiritual to almost have been offensive in another way. So it’s sort of this thing that you’re trying to balance.

I wish we had more time today. is there anything else that’s on your mind.

Well, it’s my birthday.

Happy birthday!

Thank you. That’s part of the life of the touring musician, is celebrating anniversaries and birthdays on the road. So anyway, that’s one little news item.

What are you listening to right now? Who are you reading?

Hmm…I recently bought a big Louis Armstrong boxed set, so I’ve been listening to that. A lot of times I’ll find myself listening to older stuff, as well as–I bought a few new cds as well, Josh Ritter’s new album. But I find myself more interested in the older stuff first. And then reading…I actually read a book by Christopher Hitchens that a lot of people are talking about, called “God is not Great,” and it’s kind of a hard book to read, but I had actually been invited to write a short rebuttal of the book for a forum where different writers and artists were asked to write an essay called “Why I Believe in God,” and so I wrote a short piece about how I saw songwriting as a spiritual discipline, and that the heart of it was a search for soulfulness, and after I wrote that piece I thought, well maybe I should go read that book. It’s a very provocative book–I almost hate to give it a shout out, because the spirit of it–it’s a little mean-spirited and it’s only part of the picture. Very thought-provoking. That’s some of my recent reading and listening.

What forum was it?

Image journal, out of Seattle.

Yes–you’ve done their songwriting workshop several times now. Is that a standing date?

We’ve done four years in a row, and we’re going to do this year. It’s been great. We were kind of scared about leading a songwriting workshop, but it ended up being a really moving experience, to have 15 people in the same room who were all interested, some were just starting out, some were graduates of the Manhattan school of music or something, and everything in between, and talk about songs what makes a good song and what interested the songwriters and that conversation was really great for Karin and I.

Did you learn a lot?

We did–the hardest part was articulating what we’re doing as songwriters, because we had to go in the room and we had to say, ‘this is what we’re drawn to as songwriters, and everybody’s going to have to come up with their own list but this is some of the stuff that we care about, so as we start listening to your songs, bear in mind that this is where we’re coming from.’ We talked about fresh language, as writers if it’s been said a thousand times we’re not that interested in it. We talked about a strong focal point in a song, like I was saying earlier, maybe one line that you can really hang the song on, like “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,” U2–that’s the focal point, that can bear the weight of a song. We talked about x factor in a song, there’s something bigger than the sum of the parts that you can’t quite put your finger on. We talked about emotional resonance, we want to feel something on our skin from time to time, so it was great–we had to actually think about ‘What are we trying to do?’ and that was harder than it sounds, for us anyway.

Going back to this imprint that you’re creating–I want to ask a little bit about digital media rights, specifically the recent buzz about Radiohead’s release of “In Rainbows.” What do you think about that?

Yeah, I don’t think they were the first band to do it–they were certainly the biggest band to do it. But I don’t think we’re that freaked out by all of that, it’s been our desire to see our music spread around, however that can happen. Obviously we’d like to make a living, you know, but first and foremost we hope that people would find some value in our songs and want to pass them around to friends or make them important mile markers in the stories that they were writing with their lives, and we’ve seen that. I don’t know how many times we’ve heard — just last night, somebody was telling me that, ‘You know, I met my boyfriend, and I was from Poughkeepsie, and when he heard that he asked me if I knew the Over the Rhine song “Poughkeepsie,” and … we’re getting married in Poughkeepsie,’ whatever, you know–and every variation of that, you know, we danced our first dance at our wedding to your song.

We talked about this on the way down here!

Or we conceived to your music, we took your music to the hospital when we gave birth–or all the way to, we buried our loved ones to your music. We were in Ireland recently, and someone told us this heart-wrenching tale of his sister who had died recently of cancer, and “Ohio” was just the record that they needed and that she played in the hospital room and the candles were lit, and this music was just part of saying goodbye. And we’re hearing this, and it is heart-wrenching, but what a great privilege to be able to share with people like that in their most important moments, through music. As far as Christianity, and some of that spirituality you were talking about, in terms of Jesus–just breaking down what Jesus was about into the most simplest core message, you know, I was hungry and you were there, I was lonely and you were there, I was in prison and you visited me, whatever, I don’t feel like physically this is always something I can live up to but through music it is a way, some small way of being present with people when they might need someone. For me, I do see some kind of spiritual disciple tangled up in songwriting…A friend of ours recently passed away, and she was in hospice care, and there was a sign next to her bed that said–over the electrical outlet–that said, “For bed only, do not unplug.” [laughs] And she had unplugged the bed and plugged in a cd player so she could listen to music, and it was a tiny subversive act but I would say to a young songwriter, like I would laugh as I said it, no pressure, but write the song that somebody’s going to listen to on their next the last day on earth, and write that song. Take it with a certain seriousness, you know, like what music can actually do. I think getting to play a handful of shows with Bob Dylan when we first started out, that gave us permission to sort of take it with a certain seriousness, because he had been such an important part of the Civil Rights movement, what was going down in America, there was this sense that music had a certain weight, and so that’s what I’d say to the aspiring young songwriter.

Catch Linford Detweiler, Karin Bergquist and the rest of Over the Rhine on tour in January and February 2008