Nowhere Farm

Here is a snippet from my essay on Over the Rhine I gave a few months ago at a conference at Princeton Seminary.

Music as Subversion

Before concluding, let me return briefly to one of the themes I explored earlier: the subversiveness of Over the Rhine’s music. Here I want to go back to where I began this paper—that hidden and elusive place Karin and Linford call home: Nowhere Farm.

Calling their home “Nowhere Farm” is more a statement about how they live than where they live. Karin and Linford’s life and the music that is inseparable from it are, I want to suggest, a parable about “place.” Living out their unique artistic vocation, they are “out of place,” out of sync with a world that lives chained to the credentials of both achievement and failure. It is not insignificant that Karin and Linford title their live albums “Live from Nowhere.” To encounter their music is, as I have suggested, to have one’s own place transformed into no-place; it is to experience a glimmer of that newness, that laughter amid tears that can come only as a gift from outside of our efforts to construct and manage “place.”

It is this overturning of “place” that makes Over the Rhine’s music subversive and therefore worth listening to deeply. What it subverts is our ceaseless attempts to possess ourselves, to place ourselves over against one another in self-assertion. Such a posture is a fundamental refusal of gratitude, a refusal to receive one’s life ever anew as a gift. To live out of gratitude, by contrast, is to refuse instead the very idea of “place,” and so it is to exist Nowhere, suspended in the anarchy of God’s grace. It is, we might say, to inhabit eschatological space. Barth therefore writes:

“The artist’s work is homeless in the deepest sense…Art does not come within the sphere of our work as creatures or our work as sinners saved by grace. As pure play it relates to redemption. Hence it is at root a nonpractical and lonely action. It belongs to the empty sphere of the uncontrollable future in the present.”

Nowhere Farm and its moveable variations exist within this “empty sphere.” Over the Rhine’s music transforms any given place into Nowhere by holding it open to the gifting of God. And indeed, Karin and Linford have received countless testimonies that their music has been invited into the most intimate and meaningful moments of their fan’s lives—marriage, birth, death—those moments when life is being “unsaid” so that it might be spoken anew. This is the gesture of “surrender” that is repeated in nearly every moment of their music. Their music has no agenda; they are not aiming to construct a place for themselves, either in the music industry or in the currents of popular culture. “You need questions/Forget about the answers” they tell us. Their music resists closure and location because life itself resists closure and location, especially if lived honestly before God.

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