Canter Bridge

This CD is my entrée to the beguiling art of Over the Rhine. If impressions count for anything, this is going to be a long, pleasant, even coquettish courtship.

The music is difficult to classify, yet adjectives abound. My first: inviting. The lyrics invite you in and reveal new depths with every return. You don’t quickly get beyond an OtR tune, you don’t quickly figure it out and move on. There is captivating suggestiveness to each line, the insinuation that there’s here than meets the eye if you’ll just stick around long enough to allow disclosure to happen on its own terms.

Karin Bergquist weighs in with her sultry alto to good effect in the Linford Detweiler tune `I Don’t Wanna Waste Your Time’, the CD’s first track. Like so many others it longs—with a rich mix of self-confidence and self-deprecation—for permanence and meaning:

I don’t wanna waste your time
With music you don’t need
Why should I autograph the book
That you won’t even read
I’ve got a different scar for every song
And blood left still to bleed
But I don’t wanna waste your time
With music you don’t need

I don’t wanna waste good wine
If you won’t stick around
I love to laugh but I’m more than just
Your alcoholic clown
I won’t pray this prayer with you
Unless we both kneel down
I don’t wanna waste good wine
If you won’t stick around

Come on lighten up
Let me fill your cup
I’m just trying to imagine a situation
Where we might have a real conversation

But I don’t wanna waste the words
That you don’t seem to need
When it comes to wanting what’s real
There’s no such thing as greed
I hope this night puts down deep roots
I hope we plant a seed
`Cause I don’t wanna waste your time
With music you don’t need

From this they take us to the jaunty, suggestive `Trouble’, which wraps up with words no doubt heard only rarely around a bar at closing time:

We’re far too serious
I think we could be
Such nefarious pyromantics

Truth be told, they just never stop. Oh, they slow down all right. They slow real down. Take `Nothing is Innocent’, which puts us to sleep in a kind of contemplative warm blanket that feels really, really good and real slow. Then you realize, belatedly, that they’re just setting us up for the wake-up call that is the gorgeously dense `The Trumpet Child’. The song is so suffused with hope, expectation, and deep spiritual resonance that it qualifies for the Jaw Drop File:

The trumpet child will blow his horn
Will blast the sky till it’s reborn
With Gabriel’s power and Satchmo’s grace
He will surprise the human race

The trumpet he will use to blow
Is being fashioned out of fire
The mouthpiece is a glowing coal
The bell a burst of wild desire

The trumpet child will riff on love
Thelonious notes from up above
He’ll improvise a kingdom come
Accompanied by a different drum

The trumpet child will banquet here
Until the lost are truly found
A thousand days, a thousand years
Nobody knows for sure how long

The rich forget about their gold
The meek and mild are strangely bold
A lion lies beside a lamb
And licks a murderer’s outstretched hand

The trumpet child will lift a glass
His bride now leaning in at last
His final aim to fill with joy
The earth that man all but destroyed

Here the winsome lilt of Bergquist’s voice goes deeply solemn. In his liner notes Detweiler, having delivered himself of the thought that `(a) theme that recurred in a lot of the old hymns was the idea that the world would be reborn with the sound of a trumpt, and we’ve all heard those great American trumpet (and horn players) …’ recalls his first memory. Writing like a man more accustomed to poetry than prose, more at home with a comma than a full stop, Detweiler remembers:

And me, my first memory, the sound of a trumpet at a tent meeting revival, I was sitting on my mother’s lap, I remember that bright brass bell, that eggtooth blast waking me up, snapping the world into focus, piercing the womb of distant muffled things, stirring my conscious mind, the sound of a trumpet! and I remember the small wooden stage at the front of the tent, stings of bare lightbulbs, my sister Grace’s braids, and me forming my first real thought: I need to be where the sound is coming from.

Oh, you’re there, friend, you’re there. In fact, don’t move for a while. OtR has captured the reality that the deep design of the universe is sensual rather than arid, concrete rather than abstract, and then they’ve sung this discovery back to us in rhythm and rhyme.

Like love, for example. OtR will likely never sing about it under the guise of those four, aligned letters. But Bergquist will toss off `Entertaining Thoughts’, an upbeat hymn of sorts to love so strong (`If it gets much worse it’s called delirious // If I were made I would be furious’) he’d just better look out or he won’t know what hit’im. Good onya’, girl.

As I was starting to say, they just don’t stop. Every song—I really mean this—is a pearl. I find myself humming lines from them as I shave. My wife thinks something is wrong with me. She doesn’t yet have a context for a man who stands in her bathroom and hums, say, `You smell like sweet magnolias // And Pentecostal residue // Id’ like to get to know ya // And shake the holy fire right out of you /// But oh, who’m I kiddin’ but me // The devil’s in the details.’

She’s a good woman, though. `Just hasn’t been hit broadside (yet) by Over the Rhine. You see, this is one of those musical phenomena that trail `before-and-after’ implications behind them like cans strung to the bumper of a newly-wed couple’s car. After OtR is a state, a condition, a longing for more words and song like these, for a longer, uninterrupted look at the poetic Grundstatt of things.

As Linford Detweiler (what a name, no?) wrote and somebody else sang and my brain will never be the same, `If the gravy don’t getcha hel’ll getcha with his eyes.’

It could have been a promise from the band. Watch out.