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New Haven Advocate
February 24, 2000

by Christopher Arnott

GUIDED ANGELS

It's a unique vision but it sounds familiar.

So there's this distinctively wistful and lyrical folk-pop group with country, jazz and alt-rock tinges and delicate female lead vocals. The musicians have some commercial aspirations but are cautious about succumbing to the artistic overhauls often wrought by big labels and self-interested producers, so they decide to quietly make an album their own way. The sparse yet radiant and deep results awe the very institutions the band was wary of, and the album becomes the biggest and most acclaimed thing they've done.

Yes, that could be the story of the Cowboy Junkies and the breakthrough Trinity Sessions. But it's also the story of Over the Rhine, an ensemble that is so Junkies-like in its artistic attitudes and vision that the two main members became members of the Cowboy Junkies touring band and even played on the Junkies' latest album.

While on the road with Canada's sweet-voiced "Sweet Jane" covermeisters, Over the Rhine is busy promoting its own surprise hit disc, Good Dog Bad Dog. In selected cities, Over the Rhine finds a small venue to play its own music. The night before the band takes the stage at Toads on Feb 28 to play Cowboy Junkies standards, singer Karin Bergquist and keyboardist Linford Detweiler - Over the Rhine's main songwriters-will play a free show at Koffee?, accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Jeff Bird.

"That's how they sold us on the doing the tour- 'When you're not working with us, you can be promoting the album,'" Detweiler said in a recent phone interview. Over the Rhine's deal as the first band to be signed to Virgin's new folk-friendly Backporch imprint begins with the re-release of Good Dog Bad Dog, a batch of personable and sensual home recordings the band made after the disappointing implosion of the last label they were on, IRS. "When we left IRS, we really went underground. The odd thing is that Good Dog Bad Dog, without any media exposure, tripled our audience. It's probably the most honest recording we've made. It had honest points of departure. I had been thinking of packing it in as a songwriter. We were fairly well broken up." When Cowboy Junkies co-founder Michael Timmins heard Good Dog Bad Dog, he invited Over the Rhine to open shows for his band, and ultimately drafted Detweiler and Bergquist into what is now a seven-piece Cowboy Junkies stage ensemble.

Good Dog Bad Dog is a strokably soft and warm but intensely strong collection of touching tunes about darkness, self-awareness and deep human values. The piano that underscores and transcends the otherwise basic guitar/vocal dialogue is just one obvious Over the Rhine distinction. The poetic, literary quality of the lyrics (most of them by Detweiler, though both he and Bergquist are proficient at both words and music) is what raises Over the Rhine over so many of their folk-pop contemporaries. In "It's Never Quite What It Seems," Bergquist sings "And your face I do know well/Every breath breathes farewell/It's so still, no soul could tell/ But one day like this the angels fell/And it's never quite what it seems." In "The Seahorse," one of several strummily upbeat songs on a disc that veers from ballads to Joni Mitchell-esque soundscapes, the singer badgers an inexpressive listener: "You can always tell me anything at all/Think of all the times you've let my lips move… Oh, what you're missing/Don't you wanna see what you're missing?"

Bergquist can warble and extend notes and change the reading of a repeated verse line as deftly as any of the vocalists to whom she's often compared - Mitchell, Sarah McLachlan and of course Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmins. But the lyrics can also hold their own as literature. So it's no surprise that when Detweiler lists his influences, they include such weighty lyricists as Randy Newman (whose sultry string arrangements Over the Rhine approximates on some of the slow songs) and Leonard Cohen, as well as a slew of 20th century novelists and short story writers.

Detweiler says he continues to marvel at his mentors: "We've learned from the Cowboy Junkies that it's not necessary to overplay, to play all the time. They're good at passing the hat musically. They have a gift of being true to their own vision." On this tour, gifts and visions seem abundant. With this connection of great minds thinking alike--and for themselves--Cowboy Junkies become newly addictive, and Over the Rhine overwhelms.