Teddy Roosevelt once said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I looked it up, and that’s what I found, anyway; and it surprised me, too. I don’t know what malaria fever-dream might have brought such a tough customer face-to-face with that startling bit of clarity, but I do know when the conscious thought first flashed across my life’s personal Situation Screen: Karin Bergquist –one half of the puzzle that is Over the Rhine— walked into my kitchen, peeled off a corduroy jacket, and there it was: inked into her arm, just below the left shoulder. Accompanied by a delicate hummingbird, the tattoo’s flowing script seemed as folksy and inevitable as if it had been cut there by Ockham’s own straight razor. It read like unadulterated truth, that is, and it stuck with me.

Karin and husband Linford Detweiler came west from their farm in Ohio ready to shed not only comparison, it seems, but all assumptions about how their new songs might live and breathe, hover and speak. Before their arrival on my turf, my communication with them had been a fast flurry of emails, occasional phone conferences, and the bundles of song that I’d find sporadically filling my morning’s inbox. I had imagined an elaborate life for the two of them, stitched together from a few threadbare facts and scrap references, and from the séance-like voices that their demos used to address me. I pictured Karin and Linford in the attic of their Civil War-era house in the rural outskirts of Cincinnati, huddled beneath a swinging bare bulb, shooing away pigeons, and confiding songs-in-progress into an old German-made reel-to-reel recorder. (I don’t know how they got that piano up there.) That’s what the songs implied upon arrival; and I imagined they paid a young undergrad, working part-time at the local Box-n-Ship, to loop the magnetic tape through a special port in his laptop in order for the songs to land in my lap, still crackling and smelling of mowed grass and jarred fireflies…still evolving.

I am not suggesting that these songs as I first heard them sounded in any way anachronistic; but rather that they shimmered in some amber band of light that stood outside of time…hung like blue smoke in rafters. And as if in some malaria fever-dream, they spoke to me with conspiratorial urgency a distilled bit of truth and reckoning I was loath to wake from.

Leave me to my fevers! I must somehow have properly conveyed, because the two gentle souls did nothing to abate them when we were, at last, standing together on my threshold in California, and our work began in earnest. They brought with them, in fact, the greatest gift one can bring to a collaborative outing, that being an abiding faith in, and a continuing wonder at the mystery involved in the process.

I’d like to say that while Over the Rhine were on my watch we did Everything in pursuit of each song’s illumination; but though we were plenty prepared –to give blood, if necessary— not Everything was required. In my role as Houdini (the hustler-illusionist a good analogy for the job of the producer), I stood ready to saw Karin in half as needed, or cough up a key while Linford suspended himself in a fish tank bound in locked chains; but to my surprise (no, it doesn’t always work like this) all that really was required was our communion: as soon as all of us in attendance came to the table, as it were, each song was invariably there ahead of us, already singing, talking trash, spilling wine and splitting biscuits.

There’s that razor again: cutting away unnecessary assumptions to get clearly to the simplest (though not necessarily easiest) revelations; etching cartoon hummingbirds into bare skin to attend naked truth.

We settled for that, then –for luminance over order, for terse beauty and a smeared-lipstick brand of soul; for spot-welding over handicraft; for leaving “the edges wild,” as Linford’s father had once so richly advised him, and for never comparing this particular journey to any other. I hear this batch of songs now the way the last one of them, All My Favorite People, seems to see the world: as naked in its finery, fiercely tender, and thorny with sweet promise; as heroically humbled, and broken to the point of availing true light to anyone who cares to look inside.

That’s a gift, by the way: brokenness is raw humanity on display, and anyone willing for you to see theirs is generously offering you something. Not for the sake of comparison, but as shared experience and continuing wonder at the mystery involved in the process.

No, I don’t know how Linford and Karin got that stately piano up through their attic’s small hatch door I have imagined. But I am not in the business of dispelling mysteries, only abiding with them when invited. Mystery is life’s strange and glorious weather, so to speak. And this time, Over the Rhine brought it with them.

Joe Henry
Barcelona, June 2010