Like most college relationships, my association with Over the Rhine at first was a hot, sweaty mess. Since then, though, we have both settled down a little bit and like most relationships that have lasted well over a decade we have become a little more calm. I don’t have the euphoric highs I used to have with Over the Rhine, but there is a lot of comfort in familiarity.

I supposed it’s appropriate then, that Adriene and I celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary at an Over the Rhine Christmas show. For our first anniversary, we flew up to Cincinnati to see a Christmas Over the Rhine concert. This year didn’t involve as much travel, but we did have to get grandparents involved to watch our children and that’s a least as much logistics and planning as a flight to Cincinnati.

The band is touring as a six-piece these days. Aside from the main members of the band, husband and wife duo Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist, the only band member I recognized was Nick Radina who had toured with them before on percussion, but tonight he mostly played the little cuatro guitar. Eric Heywood played slide guitar and electric guitar and liked him better on slide than the standard electric guitar, though he was very good on acoustic as well. Jennifer Condos and Jay Bellerose held down the rhythm section and are a romantic couple as well as I understand it. The drummer was more much subdued than Mickey Grimm’s long flashy solos, but used a variety of brushes, mallets and such and spent a lot of time on the toms instead of the snare. All of the members were involved in creating the music for Over the Rhine’s latest album, Meet Me At the Edge of the World.

Most of the songs were from the new double album and they played mostly the half of the songs that I like from Meet Me At The Edge of The World so that was good. I was hoping they would do some Christmas material and they did do some songs off of Snow Angels and a couple from their new upcoming Christmas album next year. There was nothing from The Darkest Night of The Year which was a little disappointing. I was hoping for at least one traditional Christmas song since they sounded so good on The Darkest Night… but no luck.

We were sitting in the middle of the theater, directly under the slightly terrifying “Big Ass Fan” which was keeping the place nice and cool during the opener, Ben Sollee. Sollee, a proud Kentucky resident, informed us the fan company was also from Kentucky. He was a nice change up for openers as he did everything solo on a cello. Unfortunately, The Variety Playhouse decided to turn down the fan during OTR’s show and it started to get a little warm and as I remembered from Cornerstone OTR + warmth + dark = sleep. Adriene and I fought it off but it wasn’t easy.

All in all, though, it was a fun show even if there wasn’t much there for an old Over the Rhine fan (when Karin said they were going to go back and play an “old” song, it turned out to be “Cruel and Pretty” from Ohio which even she admitted was only going halfway back through their catalog) the full band treatment gave a many of the new songs a little more life. I swore I’d never become one of those fans who always wanted only the old stuff from a band in a concert and we’ll see if I can hold that at bay. Much like I enjoyed celebrating a long and happy marriage (so far) I’m okay with celebrating a long and happy career (so far) from a great band. Thanks for all of the music, Over the Rhine, new and old.