Over the Rhine 'At the Edge of the World'

Maybe you've never heard of Over the Rhine, even though they've recorded some 25 albums since the early '90s and toured with the likes of Bob Dylan and the Cowboy Junkies.

But for hundreds of thousands of fans, the literate music of husband and wife singer/songwriters Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler is like a secret handshake, signifying meaningful moments and important passages in their lives.

Bergquist and Detweiler will be coming back to metro Atlanta to play a pair of acoustic shows — at Eddie's Attic in Decatur August 23 and at Red Clay Theatre in Duluth August 24 — in support of "Meet Me At The Edge Of the World," a new fan-funded double album, due out in early September on their label, Great Speckled Dog.

The album was produced by Grammy-winner Joe Henry, producer of the previous Over the Rhine album, “The Long Surrender.” Powered by Bergquist’s beautifully expressive folksy/jazzy vocals, it features a quietly compelling collection of songs that range through idyllic, wistful and spiritual moods, all inspired by the couple’s rural southern Ohio retreat.

Their pre-Civil War-era farm is called Nowhere or Now Here, “depending your point of view,” Detweiler said one recent morning, calling from the farm’s writing shack and giving little glimpses of the scenery.

“I’m looking at a beautiful male goldfinch and there’s a couple of mockingbirds over in the dead elm tree on the edge of the property,” he offered at one point.

Invited to give the uninitiated a thumbnail history of Over the Rhine, Detweiler, who grew up in an Amish and Mennonite family in Canton, Ohio, laughed and asked, “How much time do we have?”

Here’s some of what he had to say:

Meeting Bergquist: "I met Karin at Malone, a little Quaker liberal arts college in Canton. I heard Karin sing there for the first time. I think when you put certain musicians together, there's a chemical reaction. I remember the first time we really offered an evening of music, for Karin's junior recital, and I was accompanying her. Somehow, she was getting something across that people were feeling on their skin. It was like the room changed."

Band beginnings: "She was a voice major and I was studying piano and we were secretly listening to R.E.M. After we graduated, I decided I was going to put my songwriting hat on and make a go of it. I asked Karin if she would be interested in … and before I finish the sentence, she said, "Yes," and was throwing her stuff into a suitcase. She likes to say she's been finishing my sentences ever since."

Over the Rhine: "We found our way down to this neighborhood in Cincinnati called Over the Rhine. It was considered the bad part of town. But to a couple of small-town Ohio kids, we felt like we had stumbled across some lost European city that somebody had levitated across the Atlantic ocean and dropped whole in Ohio. Most of the buildings were three and four stories tall from the mid-1800s and we were just kind of romanced by this neighborhood."

First recordings: "We played our first show as Over the Rhine in 1990 in a little laundromat bar in Cincinnati called Sudsy Malone's. A few years later, we got our first big break and opened a handful of shows for Bob Dylan. We got signed to IRS (Records) by the same guy that had signed R.E.M."

Finding success: "We've never had a huge pop hit single, so we've kind of flown under the radar. But hundreds of thousands of people have found our records and passed them around, sort of like lost love notes. Somehow we've found an audience and we've been making a full-time living at this for over two decades. In a lot of ways, we were ahead of the curve, in that we realized early on that we wanted to own our music and own our records instead of giving it away forever to record companies."

Musical marriage: "It's not for the faint of heart, let me tell you. Some of our friends say, 'Man, if I was with my partner the way you two are together, we'd kill each other inside of a week.' We are very a much a package deal. We travel together. We come home together. Somehow, we've found a chemistry that works for us. We always had a good musical partnership. That eventually changed into a romantic relationship and a marriage. We almost became a cliche at one point. We were wrung out from the road and we almost packed it in and went our separate ways. But we figured out how to stay together."

Nowhere Farm: "My father, who passed away few years after we moved here, had a bit of advice for us. As we fixed things up, he encouraged us to leave the edges wild for the birds. And that became an important weird metaphor for how we wanted to live our lives, what we wanted our writing to feel like and even for our home, this idea of leaving the edges wild. This place comes up in some way on every song on the record. All the songs revolve around this little piece of unpaved earth. In late fall, when the fog rolls in, it really does feel like we're sitting at the edge of the world."