Over the Rhine‘s Ohio: A Double Dose of Brilliance

2025 Update: Below, you will find my original review of Over the Rhine's double-album Ohio, published in 2003 at Looking Closer with Jeffrey Overstreet. As a music critic, I was just a beginner, less than a decade past my early music reviews for my university newspaper.

I will never forget my first experience of this record. I was at the Cornerstone Festival’s 20th anniversary (here’s a documentary about it), where I found Linford Detweiler opening up a big cardboard box with a box cutter. The box popped open, revealing stacks and stacks of CDs: the band’s new album. He smiled, handed me a copy, and said, “Why don’t you go take this for a drive and let me know what you think?” I grabbed the CD, ran to my rental car, and spent more than an hour driving through the countryside around the festival, cruising through cornfields, blasting every glorious track out the windows for the very first time, songs that would soon be woven into my DNA.

And I remember, very specifically, hearing the song “Changes Come” for the very first time, and feeling overcome by — I really don’t know how else to say this — a wave of spiritual energy. It was almost like a voice, as resonant as a drum, but as reassuring as a mentor’s calm counse: “Your life is about to change in extraordinary ways. It is going to be difficult and full of uncertainties. Do not be afraid.”

I pulled the car over. I was shaking. Tears were streaming down my face. And, unable to do anything else, somewhere on long and empty stretch of road in Illinois farmland. I remember praying a prayer of surrender. In some ways, I was ready for change, even though I couldn’t have imagined what those changes would be. I asked God to give me the strength, to provide the resources, for whatever was about to happen.

Now, whenever I hear that song — on Ohio, or live (I just saw Over the Rhine perform it at their Nowhere Else festival on Labor Day weekend this year) — I feel that Spirit moving around and through me. And even now, as we experience fundamental changes and losses we could never have imagined — our democracy, our landmarks, our neighbors, our right — the song speaks more and more powerfully as a prayer for God to deliver us from evil and make all things new.

Here’s the album review.