Eight years ago, musicians and husband and wife Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler moved from Cincinnati to a brick farmhouse in rural Ohio. Linford had seen the house and loved it at first sight. Karin took a little convincing. But when she saw it, she was smitten: "Sure enough we rounded the bend in the road, and I saw it. It was an old, old brick house that looked like it had a lot of love in it at some point."
The space around the building was inviting and green with rolling fields. "It felt like home," Karin says.
A bachelor had lived in the home for a long time, so it took some elbow grease to get the little hideaway farm livable. Soon the couple were enjoying the place they now call "living at the edge of the world."
"Sometimes when the fog rolls in out there, you look out the window and it looks like we're just sitting at the edge of the world and there's nothing beyond that line of fog," Karin says.
Living in that old house has become an answer to a question they hadn't asked themselves.
Linford's father saw the place and immediately had some advice. "He encouraged us to leave the edges wild. Isn't that great?" asks Linford. That advice became a metaphor for the couple. It's a way to think about their life, their writing and their music. Variations of that phrase comes up in three different songs on their latest release, "Meet Me at the Edge of the World."
Karin and Linford record and tour as Over the Rhine. Their name comes from a Cincinnati, Ohio, neighborhood where they used to live.
http://youtu.be/Ega5McGgwJs
Over the Rhine is coming to the Triangle Friday April 11 and Saturday April 12 as a part of Duke Performances. They will be sharing the stage with Joe Henry and The Milk Carton Kids. The evening is called, appropriately enough, "Wild Edges."
