I see the music industry as a crowded noisy well-lit room full of beautiful people standing around with drinks, being waited on, fashionably dressed, laughing, talking. I’ve spent a little time grinning to myself on the outskirts of this room, feeling never quite at home.

But now I leave the crowded noisy well-lit room. I slip away with you through a side door. We let the chatter fade, the chaff blows away and there is new growing wetness on the after dark grass along this tree-lined street.

And the sky. The sky is an upside down cobalt blue breakfast bowl of stars newly spilled and milky and we feel our eyes sting in the chill air. And we begin walking in the same direction and I realize there are so many things I’d love to tell you because now there is no longer need for words. This arresting silence is everything to me.

But what we need is music and the music is inside of us and I look at you and know that I want my life to be a work of art. Yes. And we give a name to these shivers of music that we gather and free and we open our hands. And the name we give to this music is Over the Rhine.

. . .

copyright 2000, Linford Detweiler