Still loving Linford.

Linford Detweiler, of the band Over the Rhine, was the first writer to convince me that non-fiction could be beautiful and interesting. (I even got to tell him so once, and he appeared to actually care.) He did this through his folky, idiosyncratic autobiographical writing in which faith, landscape, and art merge with the self. And now, he's done it again:

"The thing about music is, you either feel it or you don't. And for whatever reason, when I sat down at the piano and Karin [his wife] opened her mouth, the room changed. We didn't plan it that way. It's just that the first time we performed together, people felt something on their skin and wanted to know what had happened, because it felt different somehow. All of a sudden we were feeling a bit shy. We didn't know what had happened, and Karin and I went our separate ways not long after we graduated. But I think that chemical reaction was lurking in the back of our minds."

A perfect metaphor for the tangibility of human connection. You can find the entire article, "Only in America: The Trumpet Child's Autobiography," in the November '07 issue of Paste, and Over the Rhine's new album, The Trumpet Child, in stores now.