The first note of music I ever heard from Over the Rhine crushed me—in a good way. Then I heard Karin Bergquist pouring out her soul as she sang the first lyrics I ever heard from the band, "What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be…" from a song called "Latter Days." If the music crushed me, the lyrics massaged me back to life and reminded me of the delicate balance between beauty and heartache—and that sometimes, heartache can be beautiful. Not in a masochistic sort of way, but in an "I'm alive enough to feel this pain" sort of way.
After hearing their music for the first time as the backdrop for a television drama, I started hearing more of their music as characters on other television shows struggled through the many challenges they faced. As I flipped through the stations the other night, I caught the tail end of another one of their songs being used in the same manor.
I only have a couple of their approximately dozen CDs and I'm not sure how "big" this group is in the mainstream of the music industry, but somehow I don't think that matters to them. While they certainly seem to have a good following, they appear to be the type of people who relish the important things of life. The two primary members of the band, Linford Detweiler and the aforementioned Karin Bergquist, are married.
Listen to this blurb about the couple, taken from their website: "Several months into a national tour in 2003, Karin and Linford realized that while good things were happening with their music, little energy, creativity, or time was left for their life together. The road began taking a toll on their marriage. They opted to put the tour on hold and retreat home. 'When we came home, we bought two cases of wine and decided we were going to put a bottle on the kitchen table every evening and start talking until nothing was left. The idea wasn't to get smashed, but to talk face-to-face and open up, even if that meant deep into the night.'"
Marriage before anything else. I knew their music touched me for a reason.
