From The Desk Of Over The Rhine: Mahjong

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since Over The Rhine issued its debut album. The Ohio-based husband-and-wife duo of multi-instrumentalists/vocalists Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist have marked the anniversary with new album The Long Surrender, which was produced by Joe Henry at his Garfield House home studio and features an assortment of musicians handpicked for the project by Henry, including Lucinda Williams. Though Detweiler and Bergquist had never worked with Henry or his assembled backing band before, The Long Surrender was finished in less than a week. The fan-funded, 13-track album was just released via OTR’s Great Speckled Dog Records, which the duo named after Elroy, their much-loved Great Dane who passed away last year. Detweiler and Bergquist will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with Detweiler.

Linford: There’s about eight different ways to spell Mahjong, but it’s a tile game that Karin and I have recently become quite addicted to playing on our laptops. It requires a certain amount of zen flow and, on a good day, succeeds in distracting the mind in a way that allows one to return to the task at hand with renewed focus. (At least that’s what we tell ourselves.) Karin and I have personal names that we came up with for many of the tiles: slanted pizza, hashish!, the Calgary Flame, Michael Wilson, candy cane. And we trash talk all kinds of crazy shit while we’re playing, since we somehow have concluded that we’re actually doing hand-to-hand combat with Kim Jong-il. Who knew he had it in for a couple of songwriters from Ohio?! And what do you get if you win? A volcano. (Insert Karin’s dirty honeymoon joke here.) Our link of choice for free Mahjong. Enjoy, and watch out for that “boing” sound, which means you just took it up the you-know-what.

Video after the jump.