Seldom do members of Over the Rhine encounter the curious smiles or luminous stories of people after a concert without someone offering up the happy aside that Till We Have Faces is still their favorite Over the Rhine recording.

"Eyes wide open to the great train robbery of my soul..."

Like a first kiss, these seedling sung words out of the brand new mouth of Karin Bergquist somehow, in some small way, change everything. She plucks the young apple from the forbidden tree growing at the center of her mind's eye and opens herself wide and as if for the first time to the awakening desire to tangle in the rhyme and reason of her own redemption. This tentative act of confession, this limp of faith, this whisper sends a ripple through her own eternity and extends an implied shoestring priesthood to any woman, man or child willing to lean in and hear her out.

And from the get go, maybe this is what sets Over the Rhine apart: hopefully one gets the feeling that an Over the Rhine recording embodies more than just some unusually captivating music. Hopefully it feels like you're holding a handwritten diary of spiritual experimentation, a secret map of longing that seeks to locate and protect that aching place deep within all of us for which we have no name, a ragged photo album full of doubtful, hopeful, stumbling, joyful, trial-and-error running leaps at life itself. This music was intended to stay up till dawn wrestling with angels or to wrap a simple melody around two young lovers in a swing with equal abandon. It's a peck on the cheek one moment and happily shipwrecked sheets the next.

The raw vibrancy of Till We Have Faces sounds like it could have been captured in heaven's three car garage just yesterday. Recorded in Tim McAllister's basement and then a borrowed Sunday School room in Oakley with laughably makeshift arrangements of wires and microphones, Till We Have Faces set a standard for homespun independent releases that surprisingly is still referenced by artists and critics alike.

Songs such as Eyes Wide Open, Like A Radio, And Can It Be, If I'm Drowning, Sea and Sky, Fly Dance, Paul and Virginia and The Genius of Water are definitive mile-markers in the early landscape of the band and remarkably, garnered Over the Rhine opening slots with Bob Dylan among others, as well as invitations to headline British and European festivals. (Not to mention some of the most devoted, diverse, inquisitive, well-read, occasionally irreverent and throw-caution-to-the-wind fans in all the world. Now we wouldn't be talkin' 'bout you would we?)

Regional publications began hailing the group as band of the year, best new alternative group, the "Ohio river's best kept secret" et cetera, and MCA signed the band to their first publishing deal. (Before the ink had dried, Linford swiped his share of the money and hauled the band off to Nashville to record Patience, flying Tim McAllister in from Portland, Oregon to engineer, but that's a different story.)

Over the Rhine is the kind of band that redreams its world with every record: if you're missing one, it's like you're missing a member of the family or a key chapter in a book that's been keeping you up at night. But the real fun here is hearing Over the Rhine's first ever attempts to bring songs in for a landing. Curious? Believe me, so was the band.

Recording asides.

Karin recorded the vocals to the first half of Till We Have Faces on a Friday night and Saturday in the Spring of 1989, got up Sunday and drove back to Barnesville. Tim McAllister had the boys record the entire first half of the record once and then threw these takes out and had them start over. He informed the group that this was the plan from the beginning but never explained his reasoning. The drums and bass and a few key guitar parts if possible were recorded on Tim's half-inch eight-track analog machine. These tracks were sub-mixed to a Beta VCR and then dumped back onto the eight-track where vocals and additional parts were subsequently added. Linford sometimes played his keyboard parts live during the actual final mixdowns. Much of the reverb on the record was generated by a Roland SRV-2000 that belonged to Tim. Linford loved this reverb unit and requested that Tim bring it to all the sessions.

After recording the first half of the project, Tim McAllister moved to Portland, Oregon. Brian was the janitor at Oakley United Church of Christ and Over the Rhine set up shop there indefinitely. There were cables running down the hallways and instruments and gear strewn all about the fellowship hall. Linford, in a radical and excessive state of mind that indicated he was getting serious about this whole recording business paid $300 for a Beyer microphone. Tim flew to Cincinnati to help set up the Sunday School studio and recorded the drums and built a leaning, monolithic structure out of eggcrate mattresses and stacked furniture that was to function as Karin's vocal booth in the middle of the room across the hallway from the room that was serving as the control room. Needless to say, the church which consisted of about seventy people in their seventies eventually let Brian go and said they didn't want any bands around anymore.

Tim eventually flew in a second time and he and Linford mixed the songs in Ric's basement on Orchard street downtown in the neighborhood of Over the Rhine in Cincinnati. The plan was to eventually re-record everything properly with a label and a recording budget. These were demos. And thus begins the mixed blessing that is Over the Rhine's recording career: more often than not, their homespun collections of songs sounded too good to discard, sketchbooks passed secretly around the world friend to friend, songs as children with an uncanny knack for making a life for themselves and getting along quite fine without expensive clothing thank you very much. Or in the words of John Lennon, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans."