Over the Rhine: Karin and Linford
It’s safe to say that music brought Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist together. They were in a band before they were friends and friends before they became husband-and-wife. But from that first moment they performed together, there was a connection, one that’s grown stronger after two decades of touring and releasing albums through their band, Over the Rhine. The road hasn’t been without its challenges, but we can all be thankful for that recital when her voice and his piano first met. Detweiler answers our questions, conferring with Bergquist, who, he says, “is always willing to chime in over my shoulder.”
Paste: Tell us the story of how you met.
Detweiler: Although Karin and I never met as children, for several years we did live just 20 miles away from each other in little coal-mining towns in Southeast Ohio, near the West Virginia border. At that time, the world’s largest dragline earthmover was carving that area of Ohio apart for coal. This monstrous machine, called “Big Muskie” was 22-stories tall, longer than a football field and was actually plugged in to a giant electric cord. A single bite of its bucket could move 20 tons of earth. As children, both Karin and I could see the lights of Big Muskie up in the hills at night as it rearranged the terrain and revised our collective horizon.
Later, both Karin and I fumbled our way to a Quaker liberal arts college in Canton, Ohio. I remember seeing Karin sitting in our student center near the pool tables and thought to myself, “There’s a lovely face.” I went over and introduced myself, and Karin has no memory whatsoever of that first meeting. That’s the sort of impression I make on women.
But I love the idea of foreshadowing, and can get drunk on it as a writer. There I was introducing myself to a young girl, who I had no idea would one day become my wife and lifelong muse and writing partner.
Paste: Describe your first date.
Detweiler: Well it started with the music for us. We did a little performing together on campus—we were both studying music, unsure of where music would eventually woo us. At her junior recital Karin sang a few arias, and I accompanied her on piano, and a friend came up to me afterward and said, “Linford, What was that? Did you feel that? It was like the room changed.” And it was just a small room in Ohio, but I suppose something did happen that’s hard to quantify. When you put certain musicians together sometimes there is a chemistry that is felt on the skin. I think Karin and I felt a shift of some kind, but we didn’t know what to make of it, so we just set it aside for the time being and went our separate ways.
But when I decided a few years later that I was going to hang my hat on songwriting and needed a singer and a band to flesh out the songs I was writing, I remembered Karin and gave her a call. She dropped everything and moved to Cincinnati, and we began writing and recording together in the ragged, beautiful, dangerous, timeless part of the city called Over the Rhine. (Ragged, beautiful, dangerous, timeless: all states of being we hoped our songs might lean toward and maybe even inhabit.) Eventually we were caught up in the romance of our young bohemian lifestyle, and borrowed the name of the neighborhood as the working title for our labor of love.
And I suppose a year or two went by before we realized we were caught in each other’s undertow. I think our first official date found us trespassing after dark in Eden Park, which overlooks the Ohio River. Two writers sneaking around after midnight while the city slept, dreaming its invisible dreams.
The next morning I emptied whatever was in my bank account (certainly less than $100) to buy the most extravagant brunch we could find at The Omni Netherland Hotel in Cincinnati. We sat a little stunned in their over-the-top art deco restaurant, which looks more-or-less like an Egyptian palace (or brothel) from a time before Christ, and lifted a glass to whatever unnamable adventure was unfolding.
And then we wandered back to our separate apartments and tried to write the soundtrack.
Paste: Could you talk about a song that means something special to you as a couple?
Detweiler: When Karin and I were mixing Over the Rhine’s third record in New Orleans, we were sitting in a great little dive in the French Quarter called Port of Call drinking Bloody Marys with our engineer, Trina Shoemaker, and a song by Dorothy Moore came on the juke box called “Misty Blue.” It was such a DNA-altering moment, a moment so pregnant with all that this beautiful, heartbreaking, imperfect life has to offer, that we eventually wrote our own song about the experience, which is called “Jesus In New Orleans.”
And I suppose we could point to many songs that are inextricably connected to a particular moment in our story. Whenever you hear a song that has become intimately tangled up in your own plot, the inner floodgates open, and the movie starts rolling. And I suppose that’s one thing that keeps us interested in the craft of songwriting.