Ah, Patience. What’s in a name? This collection that opens with the atmospheric sensuality of Jacksie, sing-songs its way through the love-drunk playful pop of How Does It Feel (To Be On My Mind), paints its name on bridges, gathers leaves for long festoons and slips away with Karin thinking out loud to herself as she looks out an after dark third-story bedroom window (you can almost see her warm breath making ghosts on the glass)--this recording was the culprit that landed Over the Rhine a national record deal.

When Jay Boberg, president of IRS Records, whose claim to fame had been discovering and signing R.E.M. heard Over the Rhine’s second recording, he couldn’t believe his ears. He was quoted in the press as saying, “Over the Rhine’s music is extremely unique. It’s intelligent and warm without being self-indulgent. I’m taken by their presentation, their style and their vision... Why mess with it? You only change a group if it needs direction. This band doesn’t need direction: it knows where it’s going.”

IRS went on to re-release Patience nationally with all original artwork intact and only a minor change in the sequence of songs. Jacksie, Circle of Quiet and How Does It Feel (To Be On My Mind) received fairly significant airplay and Over the Rhine appeared on syndicated radio shows such as World Café and Mountain Stage.

The band peddled its songs as far as Finland, and Karin still references the powerful image of three young Finnish boys one morning standing in a circle in a field playing their violins, their backs to the universe.

Over the Rhine was flooded with mail from around the world written by people who had discovered this new and strangely reverent soundtrack for their lives. Karin arranged a series of handwritten letters on a wooden table, which separately described people meeting each other to Over the Rhine’s music, falling headlong in love to Over the Rhine’s music, walking down the aisle to Over the Rhine’s music, dancing their first dance, conceiving and giving birth in the hospital to Over the Rhine’s music, and especially in the case of Jacksie, reflecting on the memories of recently lost loved ones to Over the Rhine - it was all a bit overwhelming, but raised the issue, “What more could a musician possibly hope for?”

Patience established Over the Rhine as a band that most likely would never be accused of making the same record twice. The record showcased songwriting uniquely out of step with the times. (Much of the world was smitten with all things Seattle after Nirvana’s Nevermind shattered mosh pit bones and sound barriers everywhere.) Over the Rhine was whispering instead of shouting, blowing kisses instead of minds and wooing the world with a quiet revolution that continues to unfurl even now.

Parts of Patience feel a tad bit pretentious to the seasoned version of the current band, but at the time, the members of Over the Rhine were young enough not to care. Linford and Tim McAllister’s production style, if anything, was informed by a child-like determination to throw out the rule book, while working within the confines of undeniably tight arrangements. “Talk along with the chorus. Sing something in broken French. Bang these pop cans with pencils during the second verse of I’ve Been Slipping. Stick the microphones out the windows. Do a spoken word piece as if you were Walt Whitman reincarnated as a lovesick teenage girl, ripe with slow curves and soaked with rain.”

It was the first time Over the Rhine got to mess around in a 24 Track studio, and although Linford described it as the “Ozark Mountain Daredevils turned loose in the cockpit of the space shuttle,” Tim McAllister always figured out how to make things work. Linford used to be fond of saying that if Tim McAllister hadn’t moved to Oregon, Over the Rhine would have conquered the world a long time ago. Tim’s influence on the first two Over the Rhine recordings is hard to quantify, but at the end of the day, the songs may have never found the life they did without him.