It is here, in this NPR story about the latest album from Over the Rhine. The album is called "Meet Me At the End of the World," and Karen Bergquist and Linford Detweiler say it's named after their farm, an hour outside their former home, Cincinnati. (Over the Rhine is, in fact, named after a Cincinnati neighborhood). In the interview with David Greene, they say they're making "untamed music ... found in the rough edges of land around their home." Here are some other rich excerpts from the story:
The couple says the music they've made of late has grown from their deep roots in their home state — be it a tree on their property that often provides flashes of songwriting inspiration ...This is a quote from Detweiler:
Yeah, it feels like we have roots here in Ohio. I was born in Ohio. Karin grew up in Barnesville, Ohio, near Wheeling, W.Va. And I guess we maybe thought, you know, as young aspiring songwriters, that we would eventually relocate to Nashville or New York. That would have been great, but we were always kind of haunted by the idea of staying here, staying put where we had some roots. I think some of these other American writers that we immediately associate with place — people like Robert Frost or Flannery O'Connor or Wendell Berry or whoever, there's sort of a particular piece of earth associated with their work. I guess for us, that's Ohio. And we've stayed here.
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Both Karin and I grew up around a lot of gospel music and we're grateful for that. I have been known to say there could have been no Johnny Cash or Elvis Presley without the music they were exposed to in their mother's hymnals. Those old hymns are just a part of the American musical tapestry; they get in your bones and they never leave.
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