NOTES

The songs on OHIO connect us to the piece of earth we call home. We grew up in small coal mining towns in the Ohio Valley, listening to music that could have only been unearthed in America: Southern Gospel, Country Western and Rock 'n' Roll. This music fertilized the soil of our early lives. We sit down at the upright piano these days with dirt under our fingernails.

Karin was born in San Jose, California, and spent a few early years in Phoenix. But after her grandfather passed away, her mother and grandmother migrated back to Barnesville, Ohio, where they had roots.

I was born in Hartville, Ohio, but my family soon moved to Fairpoint, a tiny town twenty miles or so from Barnesville. As children, both Karin and I could see the distant lights of Big Muskie, the world's largest dragline earthmover, working long after dark, pulling the tree-lined hills of Ohio apart for coal. A single bite of Big Muskie's bucket could move 325 tons of earth.

Karin and I met at a small Quaker College in Canton, Ohio. I heard her sing. Like love, a voice can flood a life with possibility, the mouth of a river flowing from somewhere faraway yet familiar. Eventually, we began writing songs together with friends in a Cincinnati neighborhood called Over-the-Rhine. The Ohio River flowed by us all the while, a dozen or so blocks to the South.

We grew up with the musical mingling common to many of us who were raised in "the church." There were the old hymns that seeped into our souls via our mothers' milk, and then there was the allure of the music we were finding on our radio dials and on our friends' records. In small town America, many of us do grow up in a surreal musical world where Elvis is King, Jesus is Lord.

The records we ended up making document in part our attempts to unravel the tangle of religion we inherited. It's unsettling when someone named Jesus keeps turning up in unexpected places on a double album, but we're by no means the first songwriters to be Christ-haunted.

One of the few working titles we had for this project was a line Karin lifted from an Anne Lamott novel: A little kick-ass beauty before we die.

One must be careful when it comes to working titles. I remember feeling in the back of my mind like we had to get this music on tape while we still had time. Like this music was our hallelujah in the gospel choir on the Sunday before Black Monday. We did write some about dying, the surest form of foreshadowing, but we didn’t set out to make a double album. That was an accident.

What was it about Paul and that old analog 16-Track, 2" tape machine? We didn't know much about Paul when we first began working together, but on the few occasions when our paths had previously crossed, he always had a knack for saying something that would stick with us for weeks afterward. And we knew he did a lot of Yoga. (Paul got up every morning at 3am during the making of OHIO and practiced two-and-a-half hours of Kundalini Yoga.)

And Paul would say the oddest things: Thank God for rhythmic imperfections. Or, If it's not embarrassing, you're not doing it right. He would be mixing a song and he’d solo a track and announce, That’s where the party is. But probably what he said most often was, It's done. We would play a new song we barely knew thinking that we were more-or-less warming up, and Paul would tape it and announce, It's done. We felt set free.

We don't listen much to our own records after they finally get made, but we find ourselves replaying again and again many of the conversations that take place underneath and around the songs. We talked about Bob Dylan Starter-Kits and Tom Waits Finishing School. Sweaty hickey parties and haunted pianos with broken hearts. Shock and awe, oil and joy. We talked about how we're often more interesting when we're misunderstood. And about God, and meditation, and the waitress at the Greek restaurant. We talked about the fact that we had 21 new songs and not one damn hit.

This music was made with an ear to the ground we walk on everyday. We live on this ground, and we will be buried in this dirt. We love the roads that take us far from this place, but those same roads have a way of bringing us back home in the end. If it's not obvious now, it will be when you hear the records we're making 20 years from now, D.V.

Linford Detweiler, June 27, 2003
The Grey Ghost