Eve turns up the volume on the blind. My word she’s a trip. Eve is Karin Bergquist in a lime-green evening gown and combat boots. Now she’s got the whole world in her hands and she takes a bite and spits out the seeds, and grins. Eve is Over the Rhine putting their soul up for sale and the whole world asking, “Could you take any less."

Eve is Ric announcing that he will be playing all the guitars on the record and Karin saying, “Oh no you’re not." Eve is coming apart at the seams. She’s been hanging out in too many dives and has had one too many beer-breathed men stumble toward her saying, “You guys ROCK," as if that’s supposed to be some kind of compliment. Eve is a microcosm of the fall of man, a captain’s journal of unmoored spiritual bearings, a woman lost at sea who sort of knows where she’s going but hasn’t yet been able to put it into words. Eve is more than the loss of innocence, it’s not being able to remember for the time being what innocence feels like. Eve suggests that sometimes the only way to touch hope is to step into a ring and lace up the gloves and put on a blindfold.

Karin, during an interview in Los Angeles, once described Ric’s solo at the end of Daddy Untwisted as follows: “You can be sitting with your hair up and your blouse all buttoned, but when that Les Paul comes in, your hair comes down and everything flies off."

Eve is a record by a band determined to play above the noise of the crowd in a sweaty, smoky room. Eve is a record by a band in the slow process of learning that a young girl leaning forward and confiding something she’s thought about is infinitely more alluring than a shiny stripper in New Jersey trying to get a bunch of people to yell.

Eve was the record Over the Rhine had to make in order to know what they were never going to be, and ultimately didn’t want anyway. And what a record she is. Eve alienated dozens of critics who had hailed Patience as one of the previous year’s best, but she won the band new and different supporters in the press who were drawn to the album’s diversity and attitude. Hundreds in the industry thought Over the Rhine had a hit on their hands. Happy With Myself? did receive considerable modern rock airplay, but IRS Records was disintegrating all around the band, a fitting metaphor for the themes of decline and fall that pervade the recording.

Trina Shoemaker recorded much of the project, one of her first, and later went on to win Grammy Awards for her work with Sheryl Crow.

Take Eve out to the car, fasten your seatbelt, start the engine, point the car at some corner of the world a long way from home, turn the volume knob clockwise and don’t look back.