MUSICIAN CREDITS.
1. All I Ever Get For Christmas Is Blue (4:24)
Mickey Grimm: Percussion
Byron House: Upright Bass
Linford Detweiler: Piano
Karin Bergquist: Vocals
2. Darlin’ (Christmas is Coming) (3:33)
Mickey Grimm: Percussion
Brad Jones: Bass, Lowrey Organ
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar, Piano,
Background Vocals
Karin Bergquist: Vocals
3. White Horse (4:14)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit
Byron House: Upright Bass
Brad Jones: Mandolin
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar, Piano, Accordion
Karin Bergquist: Vocals
4. Little Town (3:22)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit
Byron House: Upright Bass
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar,
Hammond Organ, Background Vocals
Karin Bergquist: Vocals
5. New Redemption Song (2:25)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit
Brad Jones: Bass, Electric Guitar
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar, Piano,
Hammond Organ
Karin Bergquist: Vocal
6. Goodbye Charles (2:17)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit
Byron House: Upright Bass
Linford Detweiler: Piano
7. Snowed In With You (5:07)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit
Byron House: Upright Bass
Fats Kaplin: Violin
Linford Detweiler: Piano
Karin Bergquist: Vocal
8. North Pole Man (3:07)
Byron House: Upright Bass
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar
Karin Bergquist: Vocal
9. Here It Is (3:24)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit and Percussion
Brad Jones: Bass, Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar, Piano,
Hammond Organ, Bells
Karin Bergquist: Vocal
10. One Olive Jingle (3:55)
Mickey Grimm: Drum Kit and Percussion
Byron House: Upright Bass
Linford Detweiler: Piano
Karin Bergquist: Vocals
11. Snow Angel (4:28)
David Henry: Cello
Linford Detweiler: Piano
Karin Bergquist: Vocal
12. We’re Gonna Pull Through (2:47)
David Henry: Cello
Linford Detweiler: Acoustic Guitar, Piano
Karin Bergquist: Vocal
PRODUCTION CREDITS.
This is a Great Speckled Dog recording.
Produced by Over the Rhine and Brad Jones.
Recorded by Paul Mahern and Peter Hicks at Nowhere Farm and by Brad Jones at Alex the Great, Nashville, Tennessee. Additional recording by Kevin Loyal at Echo Park Studios, Bloomington, Indiana.
Mixed by Paul Mahern, except “Goodbye Charles” (Brad Jones) and “We’re Gonna Pull Through” (Kevin Loyal).
Mastered by Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering, Phoenix, Arizona. (This music was designed to be played at magnificent volumes.)
Illustration by Clinton Reno.
Photography by Michael Wilson. (Additional photos courtesy of the Bergquist/Detweiler Archive.)
Design by Owen Brock at Visual Fluency. (visualfluency.com)
Special thanks to Over the Rhine’s manager, Glen Phillips. (glen@beatmanagement.com)
Booking: Ali Giampino at Billions Corporation. (giampino@billions.com)
Tour management and more: Brandon Dawson.
Live sound: Dave Foreman aka Juicy.
The title “North Pole Man” was inspired by a drawing by Polly Wilson, Age 7, called “North Pole Man Holding A Map Looking For A Warm Place.”
NOTES.
Last year we moved to a pre-Civil War farmhouse on a piece of land surrounded by open fields and meandering tree lines. The sky is bluer out here by day and blacker by night. We see real stars after dark especially when the moon is new. When the moon is full, we walk the mown night paths in a light that feels sacred, a light that has the same effect on the body and senses as a good glass of wine, or secret good news, or maybe good laughter remembered silently from a distance. It was a dream to land in a place like this, plant our feet on a piece of earth surrounded by a few tall trees, trees that have been alive much longer than we have. Apart from good music, the sound of the wind moving through the pines next to the back porch may be as close as we’ve come to the sound of the Holy Spirit moving. We can get lost there.
Our own songs have nudged us forward in a life we now recognize as very much our own, the life we have been given. We’ve been more-or-less penniless on various occasions, but it seems we nonetheless often manage to be surrounded by exceptionally good food and drink and people who have stories to tell and a knack for making us laugh. In the early days, I once described the life of the touring musician like this:
It’s a beautiful vacation
But you wear Salvation Army clothes
I look out the guest room window here at the farm as I write this: I see nothing but increasingly familiar trees, fields and sky: more than worth the price of admission.
The songs continue to arrive, and we continue to need to know where the songs want to take us. We’re still curious. We still have the ability to be surprised.
So we invited Paul here to Nowhere Farm awhile back to help set up the microphones and get us started on this our first real recording at the farm. We sat on the back porch and talked about music and how everything in the universe is vibrating, everything joining in.
The leaves are falling, the rocks are crying out, harmonic clouds are drifting by, stars are droning light – whether or not the human ear is capable of tuning in, it’s all pulsing, it’s all connected, an infinite organism of song. I confessed that my mind has been chattering away this year like a dancing puppet with a sprained ankle. How do I quiet my mind and tune into the bigger picture?
Paul gave us a new ancient mantra, a tuning device, a mind-quieter: Sa Ta Na Ma, Wa He Gu Ru: Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
It was an eye-opener. As a musician, I can riff on these words, find countless variations.
Every day arrives, becomes evening, becomes night, becomes morning: Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
A hawk flies dead quiet into the locust grove next to the garden and waits: Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
The maples this year were golden, rouged through and through, gilded with ambers and lovely rust. The maple grove shook out the softest yellow blanket of leaves, a kneedeep invitation. Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring: Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
My own father turned 80 this fall. My father: the Amish boy who left the Amish farm at age 21 and eventually bought an upright piano for his own son. Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
This is the vibration of the universe, the everywhere song, the rhythm of everything.
I’ve been trying to figure out why it was so fun to write and record these songs. Karin and I are drawn to Christmas music like children to snow: it just feels like play. It could be that Karin grew up with the voices of Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole on her grandmother’s record player – singers who made Christmas feel like no other time of year. It could be that my own father loved to unearth odd Christmas gems like “Do You Hear What I Hear” or Mahalia Jackson’s “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”
As we set about brewing this music, we tried to steep it in the stuff of the everyday. But somewhere along the way we realized that underneath everything, isn’t that ancient mantra, the deeper rhythm, the crux of Christmas? Isn’t the Christ child, the baby in the manger born surrounded by blinking animals, the baby that grew to a man and taught his followers to love the Creator with all they could muster and their neighbors as themselves, isn’t the life story of Jesus the quintessential embodiment of this deepest of all rhythms: Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
Come late November on Nowhere Farm when the leaves are lying down and the earth is lying fallow, we’ll put lights up in the windows and trim a Nowhere Farm tree, and lift a glass of something warm and glowing with the familiarity of home. (Karin has always loved this time of year.) And then we’ll come looking for you with these songs all wrapped up for real. (In the thick of the night, take me out of the cold, let me sing inside like a radio...)
And when we finally get back to the farm a few days before Christmas Eve, and it’s just the two of us and the dogs and the cozy kitties, we’ll pray we get snowed in. And after the storm, when all is still, the stars will wink at the sleepy farm, and we’ll hear the sound of the violin in our heads, and we’ll burrow down deep in our beds, and we’ll breathe ourselves grinning full of Christmas: Birth – Life – Death – Resurrection: Wow God.
Happy holidays,
Linford Detweiler for Over the Rhine,
Nowhere Farm, November 3, 2006