Over the Rhine

Over the Rhine's 15th studio album ​Love & Revelation​ arrives in time for 2019,
the duo's 30th continuous year of writing, recording and touring together. In that
time, singer-songwriters/multi-instrumentalists Karin Bergquist and Linford
Detweiler (who've been married for 22 years) have built a vivid,
emotionally-charged body of work that has won them a deeply devoted following
and critical acclaim.
Like its predecessors, ​Love & Revelation​ showcases the pair's timeless songcraft
and understated yet soulful delivery. Those qualities are prominent on such
memorable new songs as "Los Lunas," "Let You Down," "Broken Angels" and
"Making Pictures," whose insistent melodies and striking lyrical imagery haunt
the listener long after the music fades.
The 11-song ​Love & Revelation​, which the rural Ohio-based duo and their “Band
of Sweethearts” recorded with longtime engineer Ryan Freeland at his Stampede
Origin studio in Culver City, CA, continues Over the Rhine's career-long embrace
of its unmistakable creative values.
"Each record we've released is authentic to a particular time in our lives,"
Detweiler notes. "They're all mile markers on a long road that beckoned to us in
our youth. Karin did a lot of the heavy lifting on this record in terms of the
songwriting and really set the tone for the project. We help edit each other's
work, and it was so great to sit at the kitchen table together and let songs come
fully into being. It's not always easy, but it is rewarding, and ultimately very
intimate work. I'm so grateful for our musical connection at this point in our lives
and marriage."
Although the duo's usual producer, Joe Henry, was unavailable to work on the
new album due to a writing sabbatical in Ireland, many of ​Love & Revelation​’s
all-star cast of musicians originally came to Over the Rhine via Henry:
Jay Bellerose, drums, percussion
Jennifer Condos, hollow-body bass
Greg Leisz, electric guitar, pedal steel, mandolin
Patrick Warren, keyboards, string arrangements
Bradley Meinerding, electric guitar, mandolin
Henry's influence is also felt in ​Love & Revelation​'s title. Bergquist continues:
"Joe always used to sign off in his emails and letters with 'Love & Revelation, JH.'
It was a little blessing he would offer—his wish, I suppose, being that anyone
who came into his circle would know love and be open to being surprised. The

phrase became important to us, and we asked Joe if we could use it for the name
of the record. He quickly gave us his blessing."
Even after three decades of record-making, Bergquist and Detweiler still find
fulfillment and inspiration in the creative process. "The poet Christina Rosetti has
a poem that begins, ​Does the road wind up hill all the way?​," Bergquist explains,
"She assures us that it does indeed, until the very end, but there are surprising
rewards along the way nonetheless. We don't know that it ever really gets easier.
But we will say the actual recording of the songs is a joy, and is something that
we just get caught up in. The lion's share of this record was recorded in just three
days, with a sympathetic group of musicians leaning in together. It's something
you can get high on for weeks. But writing songs, the mixing process and
fine-tuning things toward the end—it can be a bit harrowing as well."
"Priorities change as the years pass," Detweiler observes. "There's a line in one
of the new songs, 'Betting on the Muse,' ​The fact that you still make me laugh is
what I'm most proud of​. That's probably the best definition of success we can
come up with at the moment. Thank God we're still laughing."
"But honestly, there is a fair amount of grieving on this record too," Detweiler
adds. "We aren't kids anymore, and we've buried people we love over the years.
Nobody gets out of this world alive.”
"One song that I had been working on for years is 'Los Lunas,'" Bergquist notes.
"It ended up being the first track on the record, and the narrator in the song
states a simple fact at the outset: ​I cried all the way from Los Lunas to Santa Fe​.
We realized that we were grieving. And I think a lot of people are. Why are we
grieving? We've lost loved ones. We've seen our friends struggling with loss—the
loss of a child, or a partner. We've seen friends and family members struggling
with chronic illness, or a daunting cancer diagnosis. As Willie Nelson wrote in
one of his recent songs, ​It's not something you get over, it's just something you
get through​. A lot of these new songs are coming to terms with our realization
that certain losses will be carried with us for the rest of our lives."
"We know a lot of people turn on the news and are in shock at what they are
seeing," says Detweiler. "Beneath that shock is grief. We are grieving the fact
that we aren't quite sure who we are anymore as Americans. Things are shifting
and being revealed.”
"But then the record takes a turn," Bergquist points out. "Some things haven't
changed. We still believe in love and revelation. We still believe in meaningful
work. We keep going, and with the darkness falling, we still find reason to
dance."

That attitude is shared by Over the Rhine's audience, which continues to
embrace the duo's music with a heartfelt intensity that transcends mere fandom.
"We think of the people who have found our music less as fans, and more as
extended musical family," says Bergquist. "We didn't necessarily plan it this way,
but our music has been very effective at creating community. People who find
our music tend to invite it into their big moments: falling in love, walking down the
aisle, giving birth, decorating for Christmas... All the way through to the hardest
stuff, like a period of extended illness, putting loved ones in the ground and
saying goodbye."
Indeed, every Memorial Day weekend, Bergquist and Detweiler host Nowhere
Else Festival on their farm in Clinton County, Ohio, where they're in the process
of transforming an historic 1870s barn into a performing arts center. The duo
invites a variety of musicians, writers, filmmakers and visual artists to join them
for a weekend of music, art and conversation. Those gatherings have been
described as extended musical family reunions for the band and its fans.
"There are different questions a young artist can ask," Detweiler observes. "One
is, 'What must I do to be famous?,' which swings the door open to all manner of
destructive forces from both within and without. Another question is, 'What must I
do to make this sustainable, to practice a craft for the long haul, to continue to
grow over the course of an entire lifetime?' The second question has always
been far more interesting to us. And to make a career sustainable, we had to
establish a fair bit of independence early on.”
"We can, and will, reflect on the last 30 years of making music, and we'll lift a
glass in 2019 to our 30th anniversary to be sure," says Bergquist. "But what's
most important and more interesting to us is to think about what's ahead: the next
30 years.”
"Eventually we want to record much of our music in the barn, host concerts,
workshops etc.," says Detweiler. "Our big idea moving forward is: Wouldn't it be
great to make music in front of a great live audience and then sleep in our own
beds every now and then?”
"For years people have been telling us that they find our songs healing," says
Bergquist. "Or they come to Nowhere Else Festival, and describe the weekend
as 'healing.' It used to always surprise us. But in recent years we have
experienced it ourselves. We always feel better when the music starts. We can
feel our bodies change. We breathe easier. We begin to believe that all may be
well in the end."
"Maybe the best thing we can do for someone who is struggling is just to let them
know they're not alone," Detweiler adds. "A good song can do that. So a

confession as simple as, I cried last night, I couldn't sleep, I'm struggling, and this
is what it looks like today, can be incredibly powerful.”
Karin concludes, “We are rhymers. And there is still so much music left to be
made.”