The Kentucky Center-Bomhard Theater

91.9 WFPK presents AN ACOUSTIC HOLIDAY SHOW WITH OVER THE RHINE & CARRIE NEWCOMER

Thursday, December 9, 2021, 8:00pm | The Kentucky Center-Bomhard Theater

OVER THE RHINE

2021 CHRISTMAS TOUR THOUGHTS One December, not long after Over the Rhine began recording and touring, we were invited to perform some seasonal songs on a public radio station in Cincinnati. It was Christmastime and apparently they thought we were up to the task. We worked up a few carols and traditional tunes and Karin even read a poem by Thomas Hardy called, The Oxen. It actually felt really good and conjured up an unusual mix of feelings from childhood: innocence, loss, wonder, joy, sadness. I think we were surprised. People must have tuned into the radio broadcast, because we began receiving inquiries as to whether we had recorded any of our Christmas songs. I don’t think we had considered it at the time, but any young, struggling songwriter is open to the suggestions of the marketplace, and people were persistent.

In December of 1996 – can it really be 25 years ago? – we recorded and released our first song cycle of some of the Christmas carols that still haunted us. We included a few original tunes and called our wintry mix The Darkest Night Of The Year. We played a special “darkest night” release concert on winter solstice in an old 1300-seat theater in Cincinnati. Every last seat was full. Folks began snatching up copies and seemed to agree that they hadn’t heard anything quite like it.

We began playing concerts around the Midwest every December and found that the rooms were usually packed full of people who had bundled in out of the cold with prized compatriots. Hats and scarves abounded. If you stepped outside during intermission, you could make ghosts with your breath in the crisp night air. And it was dark – oh so dark: a time of year with its own music.

A decade later, in 2006, we released our first full collection of original Christmas/ holiday songs called Snow Angels. What is it about Christmas music and the undeniable gravitational pull it exerts on some songwriters? So many Christmas songs have already been written. I think we are genuinely curious about the ones that haven’t yet been written.

We continued to tour every December and these special year-winding-down concerts began to feel like an annual tradition – gatherings of extended musical family, without whom, we’d be homeless.

By the time we released our third holiday album of original songs, Blood Oranges In The Snow, in December of 2014, Karin suggested we had discovered a new genre of music: Reality Christmas. It’s true: if you’ve buried a loved one, or lost a job, or battled a chronic illness, that stuff doesn’t go away during the holidays. It can be a complicated season for many of us.

And then there’s family.

When Karin and I make the annual holiday pilgrimage home to visit family and pull into the driveway and turn off the car, one of us inevitably looks over at the other and says, “Tie a rope around my waist, I’m goin’ in.”

In 2021, more than twenty years after releasing our first holiday CD, we are still at it. This year, we will be leaning into some harmonies and making an intimate but hopefully holy ruckus. It won’t be all Christmas music: we’ll certainly mix in tunes from many of our records along the way. But hopefully it’s still true: hopefully you haven’t heard anything quite like it.

Maybe a midnight snow will fall and turn each streetlight into its own private snow globe. Maybe, regardless of whatever reality Christmas brings, we’ll hear a faint echo of a song once rumored to have been sung by angels, a song of peace on earth, goodwill toward all...

We’ve never heard anything quite like it.

And after the surreal and challenging season we’ve all been through, with stages all around the world going dark, I’m not sure about you, but live music in a warmly lit space with real live breathing humans? We’ll be there.

We hope you’ll join us,

Linford Detweiler With Karin close by Nowhere Else Clinton County, Ohio

Carrie Newcomer is a songwriter, recording artist, performer, and educator. She has been described as a “prairie mystic” by the Boston Globe and, “asks all the right questions,” by Rolling Stone, “a voice as rich as Godiva chocolate,” by The Austin Statesman, and, “She’s the kind of artist whose music makes you stop, think and then say, ‘that is so true,’” by The Dallas Morning News. Recent appearances on PBS’s Religion and Ethics and the National Award-Winning Krista Tippett’s On Being, have focused on her use of creative artform as a spiritual/mindfulness practice, her work in social/ environmental justice, interfaith dialogue, progressive spirituality and as a champion for a new political conversation. She has toured with Alison Krauss in Europe and the United States. Nickel Creek recorded Newcomer’s song, “I Should’ve Known Better,” on their Grammy-winning album, This Side. In the fall of 2009 and 2011 Newcomer was a cultural ambassador to India, invited by the American Embassy of India. In October 2011, she released her interfaith collaborative benefit album, Everything is Everywhere, with world master of the Indian Sarod, Amjad Ali Khan. In June 2012 Carrie Newcomer traveled to Kenya, Africa, performing in schools, hospitals, spiritual communities and AIDS hospitals. In 2013 Carrie visited organizations dedicated to nonviolent conflict resolution through the arts and the empowerment of women in the Middle East. Huffington Post Religion Community listed her song, “Holy as the Day is Spent,” as one of the best spiritual

songs of 2012. She was listed as one of “the 50 most influential folk musicians of the past 50 years” by Chicago’s WFMT. Boston’s WBEZ listed her as one of the most influential folk artists of the last 25 years.

Her newest release is The Beautiful Not Yet (Available Light Records, September 2016). Other Available Light recordings include A Permeable Life and Everything is Everywhere. Newcomer also has 14 national releases on Concord/Rounder Records including; The Geography of Light, The Gathering of Spirits, and Before and After. In 2014 Newcomer also released her first companion book, A Permeable Life: Poems and Essays. Over half the songs on The Beautiful Not Yet were created for a spoken word/ music collaboration with Parker J. Palmer entitled, What We Need is Here: Hope, Hard Times and Human Possibility.

Newcomer’s first theatrical production, Betty’s Diner: The Musical, was produced as part of the Purdue University 2015/2016 theatrical season to rave reviews and a totally sold out run. The music for Betty’s Diner: The Musical was written in collaboration with Richard K. Thomas and arranged by Gary Walters. Other recent collaborations with influential authors, scientists and theologians, include Jill Bolte Taylor, Phillip Gulley, Scott Russell Sanders and Rabbi Sandy Sasso.