Over the Rhine had been busy touring (including extensive tours and recording sessions with The Cowboy Junkies) for several years following the release of Good Dog Bad Dog. In the Spring of 1999, an Ohio journalist called and reminded Linford and Karin that (depending on how you did the math) the 10th Anniversary of the inception of Over the Rhine had arrived. (OtR did their first tentative recordings in the Spring of 1989, played their first real show in the Fall of 1990, got their first self-produced CD, Till We Have Faces, out the door and released in 1991.)

It seemed like a little celebration was in order. A mile marker of some kind.

“Since we had been on the road so much, we didn’t overthink it. We knew we had a bunch of archival material – concert recordings which showcased pretty much every chapter of the band to date. And we had certainly been having fun with the line-up – trying different configurations – six or seven musicians on stage at a time – or sometimes just two or three of us on stage – we were letting the songs wear different clothes, stripping things away, inviting some of our fave musicians to sit in...

We had recently done a show with The Northern Kentucky Symphony which had been taped and broadcast. And the band had performed a handful of new songs “live in the studio” – simple documents recorded by Mark Hood in Bloomington – as demos for Capitol Records. So we figured we should share the love a bit and include a few of these (Moth, Anyway, I Will Remember).

Bono said that when he was a high school student, they were talking about William Butler Yeats or some such having writer’s block, and Bono raised his hand and said, Why didn’t he just write about that? The point being, If you’re willing to tell the truth about what’s really going on, there’s always something to write about.

In some ways, this has always been our approach to recording. As long as we’re vulnerable, crazy, modest, naïve, bold enough, whatever, to more or less document what actually happened, then we always have something we can offer up as a gift to anyone within earshot. As long as we’re willing to play the holy fool and risk embarrassment, maybe the result will be useful, of interest, inspiring. Maybe the people in the room at the time felt something undeniable on their skin. If the room changed, if something happened, if a few people felt it, why not the world?

So yes, it may sound immodest or overly earnest to verbalize it, but this collection is the sound of an American Band trying to get at something great, something exceptional. Something worth waking up for.

Hope you like it.