As touring musicians do, Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler have traveled the world, soaking up the energy in downtown venues packed with fans of their band, Over the Rhine.
But when the lights fade and the plane lands back in the couple’s hometown of Cincinnati, the husband-and-wife team prefer their 1830s farmhouse and the tune of chirping birds instead of rock and roll.
“We do love that life (on the road), but we also love the idea of returning home,” Detweiler said. “It’s sort of the other end of the spectrum where we have lots of quiet and lots of time to re-center, regroup and rejuvenate.”
These two country mice will get the best of both of their worlds when they perform at the seventh annual Nelsonville Music Festival May 15, set in the rural Athens County countryside but bringing in more fans for the three-day event than ever before.
Bergquist and Detweiler noticed their musical chemistry before anything else when they began playing together in 1989. Their relationship soon matured in time with the music as they fell in love and eventually married in 1996.
“We had to learn how to take care of a marriage and take care of a career,” Detweiler said. “We weren’t sure how much overlap there was at first. It’s something we had to experiment with, and it’s something that we are still growing into.”
After more than 10 albums together, the duo has come into its own in the studio. Bergquist’s sincere, soulful vocal centerpieces — “I think (she) sings from a place where her pain lives,” Detweiler said — have only grown wiser over the band’s well-crafted, simplistic melodies — a testament to the couple’s bittersweet views of life, love and longing.
But with more than 20 years of experience in the industry, Bergquist and Detweiler wanted to be surprised by their new record, February’s The Long Surrender. They spent a week in a Los Angeles studio and left much of the vision to producer Joe Henry, who has worked with Ani DiFranco and Elvis Costello, and a backing band he put together.
The end result was an album “that we had to make in order to be able to hear it in our heads,” Detweiler said.
“I suppose there are fleeting moments of sheer terror, all in all,” Detweiler said. “For some reason, we were at a place in our career and in our lives where we were excited about the sense of the unknown and being surprised. We did want to let go of our expectations.”
With each new record, Detweiler said the couple’s goal is to add to the “unfolding story,” remaining cohesive but marking each growing moment of discovery like rings on a tree. And whether Over the Rhine plays it at home in the hills of Southern Ohio or beneath the city lights, the moral of the story is still the same.
“These songs are probably one of the most intimate expressions of who we are and what we’re thinking about, so it doesn’t really matter if it’s Nelsonville or Seattle or Amsterdam,” Detweiler said. “The point is when you walk out on stage, it’s almost sacred ground of some kind, and you just surrender to the moment and let something happen.”
al106606@ohiou.edu
@ThePostCulture
