The songs on OHIO connect us to the piece of earth we call home. We grew up in small coal mining towns in the Ohio Valley, listening to music that could have only been unearthed in America: Southern Gospel, Country Western and Rock 'n' Roll. This music fertilized the soil of our early lives. We sit down at the upright piano these days with dirt under our fingernails...

We grew up with the musical mingling common to many of us who were raised in "the church." There were the old hymns that seeped into our souls via our mothers' milk, and then there was the allure of the music we were finding on our radio dials and on our friends' records. In small town America, many of us do grow up in a surreal musical world where Elvis is King, Jesus is Lord.

The records we ended up making document in part our attempts to unravel the tangle of religion we inherited. It's unsettling when someone named Jesus keeps turning up in unexpected places on a double album, but we're by no means the first songwriters to be Christ-haunted.