In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
-Shunryu Suzuki

NOTES.
Several days ago curiously enough while we were in the midst of planning our next record, maybe it was Maundy Thursday, a music journalist phoned and asked, “Isn’t this the ten year anniversary of Over the Rhine?"

So it is.

What follows may well be some form of spontaneous combustion I don’t know. I walked upstairs toward a leaning windowless room in the Northwest corner of the attic, opened the wooden door on a brand new shivering diagonal slice of dusty Northern light, walked in as if I might trip an alarm, picked up a heavy cardboard box, backed out, turned around closing the door behind me with an unsteady left foot, took a few steps, turned my head slightly to one side to make sure no one was looking and rather unceremoniously dumped hundreds of cassettes and digital audio tapes onto the Indian rug. I stared for about thirty seconds, tossed the box off to one side and got down on my hands and knees: there we all were.

If you walked into a room during the course of the last ten years while Over the Rhine was on stage redreaming the world and hoping for a little wideness and wonder or whatever, you may have turned around and walked out or scratched your head or chuckled or stood stock still or elbowed your way closer or maybe the room was mostly empty. (I can remember setting up and sound-checking at Kilgores one night during the baseball playoffs in 1990 and Michael Wilson was the only person who showed up. We sat at the bar, watched the game, didn’t play a note all night. The Reds went on to win the World Series in four straight.) But if you were there when we did whatever it was we did, this is what you heard. This recording is one way of impulsively baking a cake from scratch and throwing a little party before we remember to feign sophistication and reserve. Pull a string, there’s a bang and ten years’ worth of confetti metaphors fly, landing on the floor a few feet away, or in our hair.

But tune the old radio to the lefthand side of the dial and turn it up deliciously. This grab bag, this cracker jack toy, this photo album of concert recordings, this Spring fling, this bird’s nest document of live arrangements and experiments spanning the earliest days of the group through just a few weeks ago is for all of us. But maybe mostly for you. Happy anniversary honey.

Linford Detweiler, April 1999