20 Signs of Life From 2003

In the liner notes accompanying Over the Rhine’s gloriously self-indulgent double-disc, OHIO, co-founder Linford Detweiler, writes, “We grew up in small coal mining towns in the Ohio Valley, listening to music that could have only been unearthed in America: Southern Gospel, Country Western and Rock ’n’ Roll. This music fertilized the soil of our early lives. We sit down at the upright piano these days with dirt under our fingernails.”

And I suppose that’s what I love about this album. The songs feel gritty and real, unpolished and perfect. Just like people. All the artifice (both musical and emotional) has been carefully dismantled, traditional instruments—upright piano, pedal steel, acoustic guitars—have been dusted off, arrangements have been simplified, windows into souls have been propped open a bit wider. The artistic flourishes on OHIO are determinedly subtle, avoiding the distance many lesser artists (consciously or unconsciously) create between themselves and their audience by overdressing the material.

In stark contrast, Karin Bergquist’s voice has never felt as undressed and painfully honest as it does in these songs, as if she’s opened her gut and tugged the melodies out like a breach baby. This process is partly masochistic, partly exhibitionist, entirely self-consuming: but such is true art. In the deeply confessional track that opens the curtain on Disc 2, “Long Lost Brother,” Bergquist sings, “I don’t mean to laugh outloud / I’m trying to come clean / Trying to shed my doubt / Maybe I should just keep / My big mouth shut.” Listen closely. Try not to flinch, even though someone else is coming clean with the truth about her story. And—even more disconcerting—your own.

Detweiler and Bergquist spend approximately 90 minutes untangling the mysteries of home, but not simply the one in Ohio. This record is equally concerned about feeling at home with your past, at home inside your skin and, on a much larger scale, at home in the world we share as humans. Amid the steady groove of “Nobody Number One,” Bergquist half-sings/half-raps, “But you came so close and I assumed / You were looking / For the piece of yourself that’s lost / It is the hiding place inside everybody / And though we love to numb the pain / We come to learn that it’s in vain / Pain is our mother / She makes us recognize each other.”

In the final analysis, OHIO, is more than simply a dense, rich, vulnerable collection of songs; it is a dirt road companion on that difficult journey inward, upward. Homeward.