FREAKWATER DUO GOES THE DISTANCE FOR EACH OTHER Kevin McKeough * 03/26/99 Chicago Tribune (Copyright 1999 by the Chicago Tribune) Who says long-distance relationships don't work? Janet Beveridge Bean and Catherine Ann Irwin mostly have lived apart since a 17-year-old Bean left their hometown of Louisville, Ky., to follow a visitor back to Chicago. (He was Rick Rizzo, now Bean's husband and partner in the band Eleventh Dream Day). TD That separation hasn't kept Bean and Irwin from maintaining a musical partnership that began with the two singing old country songs together in Louisville and has continued with their singing old- sounding country songs together in Freakwater. "One of the reasons it's able to be ongoing is that we live apart," Bean says. "It's nice to see each other, but Catherine has a life down in Louisville and I have one in Chicago." Distance amid unity also is a characteristic of Freakwater's transfixing harmonies. There's an exquisite tension in the way that Bean's sweet, crying soprano and Irwin's cracked, drawling alto don't quite mesh, something haunting in the space left between them. Those harmonies, coupled with Freakwater's Appalachian melodies and old-timey instrumentation -- acoustic guitars, fiddle, steel guitar and upright bass -- have drawn comparisons to country legends the Carter Family, which Bean thinks are misguided. "Our references include the Carter Family," she says, "but they include a lot of things since the Carter Family." The Carter Family didn't sing much, for example, about religious skepticism. Or drug addiction. Or the decline of organized labor. Or Muhammad Ali. These subjects all crop up on "Springtime," the most recent of Freakwater's five records. Although Irwin has been the group's main songwriter, Bean provides her own input. The collaboration "takes place with Catherine and I just sitting and playing the songs. We have a sense of each other's styles and where we're going with the song." Having released its first record in 1989, Freakwater can claim to * be at the forefront of the alternative country movement, a thought that makes Bean shudder. "I'm sorry if we've dragged anyone down with us," she protests. "It wasn't a trail anyone should have taken." ----------