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Interview with Gary Wehrkamp - Shadow Gallery
The new Shadow Gallery album Room V is pretty much everything I hoped it would be, so I was not one to miss a chance to talk to one of the guys behind it. Gary Wehrkamp called me up one friday evening and was nice enough to answer all the questions I had, some in ways I had never even imagined. He is one funny guy, that's for sure. During the not so formal introductions I found out that Gary had been doing interviews all day and he had several more to go after mine, so after promising to wear him out completely we got the interview underway...
So the new album will be released on monday. Is it everything you wanted it to be?
No, because I wanted it to be released on friday. (Laughs) No, you know as they say, art is really never completed or realised. It's just abandoned. But I think in our case we really aren't ready to put it out until it's what we want it to be. It always ends up being a mad rush in the end, trying to fit in all those extra things we wanted. There are a couple of things I would have liked to have done for this album, like to have worked with a full orchestra, but that just leaves room for future goals. So yeah, we're very pleased with it.
Great. Well, I'm one of the guys who really loved the Tyranny album.
Oh, good then that should hopefully lead you to this record. Storywise it does.
I got the promo about a month ago and have been listening to it since. I think Room V lives up to the legacy.
Oh great. And nice of you to tie in another album title in that sentence too. (Laughs)
Yeah, I really thought about that one. (More laughing)
Anyway, did you run into any problems during the recording or did it go smoothly?
(Laughs loud) ... I would say typically it did go much smoother, but yeah, we had some setbacks, there were some things. The toughest thing was probably when we were getting set to record the drums. I picked a studio that was in the other side of the country and we had to fly out, so it was tough to make that schedule work with the studio owner, the engineer, myself and the drummer.
We finally got it togwether and unfortunately had a little bit of bad luck. Just as I was about to leave and fly out my father dies. So it kind of put everything on hold. That was our first probably major drawback in the recording process. But overall it wasn't like... with Tyranny we had one problem after another and I would say after this bump... Well, I don't want to underplay it, it was more than a bump in the road, it was a very tough time but basically we got on and we didn't run into any other major problems.
The writing process in shadow Gallery is very much a collaborative effort as far as I have understood.
We try to make it as collaborative as possible.
Yeah, but do you ever run into something where you completely disagree?
Oh yes, of course (Laughs). But, usually we understand and we know what other people are going to like and dislike. We're always true to ourselves, and nobody brings any ridiculous ideas to the table. We try to avoid that whole layer of disagreement by agreeing that we're really going to try and move forward with the best stuff. We all have that in the back of our minds. You know, typically there is always going to be somebody disappointed to some degree because if we write 300 minutes of music, we can't obviously use it all right away.
But honestly there are very very few problems. With this album there were very few disagreements overall. I was the producer of the album but I'm not one of those really rigid type producers I just try to be completely diplomatic and if someone has an idea and even if I don't agree with it I will find a way to make it work in there. Maybe I will do it with a different spin or a spin that is better for the band or more the way I see it, but all ideas are considered.
I especially think the vocal melodies on Vow are amazing. Did it take long to get them right?
Well, the amazing vocal melodies for that are all Carl as are most of the entire album and I think he experienced something just like I did. That was probably one of the easiest songs to write ever. That song wrote itself. When I was composing musically I just had the idea on guitar and I immediately pretty much heard the whole thing in my head, how I wanted it. I recorded it really really quickly and laid down the keyboards and threw a drum track down real quick and probably tracked the whole thing in a matter of an hour or so.
Most of what I did on the demo had so much emotion to it that two things happened. 1, I think it really inspired Carl to come up with something great, which he did, and 2, there was just no way to recreate it and when there wasn't time during the master recording to do this song again I just thought 'I really wouldn't do anything differently so why am I wasting my time'. So I took all the keyboard parts and even the backing ahh's and the vocals from the demo and just used them. Maybe they are a little out of tune here and there but what is way more important than that is that they have the emotional quality. So Carl really brought that song to life with his melodies and that is probably one of my favorites on the record too.
So Mike just nailed it right away or what?
Yeah, it took some doing to get that emotion. Sometimes what is really tough is that when Carl writes the lyrics and melodies, he will sing a demo of it and he will give it back to me and to Mike as well to learn. But I just fell in love with the way Carl sang that song. He doesn't just go in there and sing it, he sings it with complete conviction and more than any other singer I have ever heard in my life. When I hear Carl's demos, he sings it like he completely means it and when you hear it you go 'Oh my god, this person is not just saying the words, this is how he feels' and I sort of believe in that Carl was this character.
It was really incredible and I made that very demanding on Mike. Usually Mike and I will go in and if I'm producing the vocals, we'll do our own take and we try to stay true to what Carl wrote but I use things differently as the producer and I'll change it, but this was one song where I wanted nothing changed and poor Mike had to go through a couple of days of me saying 'Do it more like Carl'. In the end I think Mike really matched that quality and got that emotion out of it.
The guitar solos on the album are really good. Especially the ones in Seven Years and The Andromeda Strain. Is that you or Brendt?
Well, Seven Years is actually Arjen Lucassen.
Really?
Yeah, as a guest appearance, the whole ending solo, which he did a great job on, is a really emotional solo. The Andromeda Strain solos that's me, the long one at the end. The first one you hear is Brendt and I playing together, the harmony guitar solo, then it's followed by my keyboard solo and then I do the solo at the end.
Great. When I listened to the album for the first time I thought that Laura Jaeger sounded somewhat different from when I heard her on Tyranny. How was the recording session this time? I know that she was pregnant when you recorded Tyranny.
Well, we love Laura, she's a great person and we're always asking her to sing differently than she really does and the way she sang on Tyranny was a very very directed approach by Carl. Carl had a very specific female vocal style in mind and it was very different for Laura to sing it in that way and she did it when she was 8 or 9 months pregnant, so I know it was difficult. This time it wasn't too much easier. It took probably four months of scheduling to come up with a day where we could do this. The timing was bad and for the first couple of months Laura flat out said that she just couldn't do it.
I kept saying 'You can't do it, I can respect that, no problem, but you know it would be really great if you could and this is why' (Laughs), so I slowly talked her into it and then her no became a 'I probably can't do it but you know what, let me just see...' She had a lot of things going on in her life which were really taking her out of having any time what so ever, but luckily we were able to do it at the very last minute. When we finally did get a date we reschuled it three times and when she was here it was about the latest we could have done it. We were getting ready to mix the record and she had a terrible horrible cold, so it was really really hard for her to sing but she pulled through and sang it even though she was very sick.
Yeah, well she sounds very good, just different.
Yes, definitely
Also when I listened to the album for the first time. I fel that Act I was over far too quickly, so I was thinking you ever planned to make this a double album?
I don't think we ever plan on making a double album for any of our records, but over time we add all these extra things. The intros get extended and this and that they usually end up being pretty long. By the standards of 10-15 years ago this certainly would have been a double album. Cause records back then were what, 35-40 minutes and our records are typically 75 minutes, so probably most of our cd's could have been doubles. But we're not looking to capitalize on that, if you can fit it on one CD we'd rather keep the price down and reach more people rather than make more money.
So there weren't any extra songs that didn't make it to the album?
Actually there were. There were quite a few. But the reason why most of them didn't make it is because they no longer fit the concept and the storyline. Once you lock yourself into a storyline you really have to be aware of the direction the music is going and obviously the lyrics are going. So other songs that had different lyrical ideas or that were just completely different musically would have seemed out of place. Also there is one aditional track that is on the Japanese release. I think 80 minutes is probably the maximum you can have on a CD and when we added this extra bonus track it brought the Japanese release to 79 minutes and 58 seconds or something. So it's about as much music as you can possible have.
So that extra song won't be on the limited edition for Europe or USA?
No, what Europe ends up getting instead of one extra 3 or 4 minute song is another 40 minutes of material. It's not quite as complex as the Shadow Gallery album. We weren't interested in doing another 40 minute album. Obviously that would have taken us a whole other year, but we were just trying to give some extra things, maybe show some different sides of the band, some things you haven't seen before. There really was any number of things we could have put on there. We really didn't give it a lot of thought. I knew there was one song I wanted to do, which was a big Pink floyd Medley that Mike and I worked down a few years earlier. So that was something where I thought, this would be a great time to put that out. I was trying to find a home for that song for a couple of years.
Then beyond that I just asked everybody else how they would want to contribute and Carl's contribution came by the way of him explaining the story in the multimedia section. We included a demo that Mike and I had done where I really loved the vocal melodies that Mike wrote. It was a cool song even though it was a demo and really under developed. I had another really progressive track that was really like old Bill Bruford or old YES kinda thing, which was very keyboard based, but very aggressive. I was going to include that, but then Joe Nevolo called me up and asked if there was any chance to put a drum solo on. So I gladly dropped my song and said Yeah, we'll throw your drum solo on. There is an acoustic version of the Rain song from the album as well.
Sounds interesting. So when you made Tyranny, was it planned to make a follow up back then. Was the whole story fleshed out back then or was it just Tyranny.
Well to be true to what the story says I'd have to say that there had to be a follow up and we kinda knew there would be. It just couldn't happen yet. Seven Years later is about the right time when it had to happen according to the story, but truthfully we didn't have all the components in place for the story. We always talked about continuing the story because it was always continued. Even before we wrote Tyranny the next chapters were already written and out there. I won't say which tracks they are but you've already heard a continuation of it in the past if you know our other albums.
Okay...
(Laughs) I don't know if that makes any sense to you.
I will dig into the other albums.
Yeah go back to the other albums and find out what comes after Room V
That's a mystery...
Yeah it's a mystery, but not the song Mystery...
Yeah I know I know.
(Laughs)
Were you inspired by any real world events for the story or was it all in your minds?
Well, real world events absolutely always have a part in what we're writing, but then we try to relate it always back to a character and his individual spirituality, which also relfects our opinion of religion and otherwise. Everything from the Iran/Iraq war was involved and events with US politics, but we weren't trying to overly make just a political statement. We were trying to make a statement about maybe the advancement of a potential new world order and how it relates to the events that are surrounding us as well as how it relates to things that are said in the bible. But it's mostly Carl's story, so he's got other individual personal feelings about all that.
Even though I don't have the lyrics to the story it feels like this is a conclusion to the story, or do you leave the door open still?
Ahh, well it is Room V, so... You know what I think all of our material feels like it has a conclusion, but in reality it doesn't. I mean really, is there ever an end to anything?
I was wondering who is the girl that cries Daddy on the album?
She's the part of Alaska, the girl that the mother gives birth to just before she dies. The actual girl's name is Libby Molnar.
Ok that was what I meant. So to get a little more personal. When did you know that you wanted to become a musician for the first time? Or what made you take that path?
Hhmmm... (Laughs) When I was very young I used to bang my head against the wall before I could even walk and I think I was trying to be a drummer. Eventually that led to me playing drums when I was about 9. I just knew that I had to have a drumset. Not that I just wanted one or it would be cool to play, but just like, I had to have one and that was it. There was no other way around it.
Probably the day I got my drumset, that changed my life and I felt great and happy and I have felt that way probably every day since. It just led to different things in my life but I kind of always known that this was what I was put on the earth to do. It's just been endless coincidences in my life of good fortune when it comes to musical instruments. My family was not really rich and guitar lessons were never even considered. We couldn't afford an expense like that. Let alone buying a guitar, so I always ended up with real junky guitars but they landed in my lap and that's continued for many many years. I mean it still goes on now but just for years people would say 'Here have a guitar. Do you want it or do you want to buy this for $5?'
So it was very fortunate that things always ended up this way. As I got older and more into the bass and the guitar I just felt like I really needed to play the piano. I didn't know why, I just knew that was what I should be doing. But there was no way for me to get a piano. It was just out of the question. Actually it's pretty funny, when I was seventeen and in high school I was actually dating girls who had piano so I could go to their house and play it. (Laughs) I told everybody that I was going to have a piano soon and they all thought I was a complete idiot.
Then I remember I entered this radio contest and the grand prize was a new piano. I was so sure I was gonna win. I told everybody I knew 'I promise you I'm going to win this piano. I don't know how but it's mine.' And I won it! They just picked my name out of a drawing of hundreds of people, so I got a piano when I was 18 and I never ever took it for granted and I played it every single day for so many years. That's where I learned to play, just by noodling around. So my life has been one series of fortunate events as it pertains to music. I have never tried to get a a job. I've never sought out employment musically, but I've been working 100 hours a week for years, doing things that went into my lap, so I'm very very happy.
That's amazing. So what would you say is your proudest moment with Shadow Gallery? If there is such a thing.
I think it is yet to come. One proud moment was when people compared Tyranny to Pink Floyd - The Wall. They thought it was better than Pink Floyd - The Wall, which I don't agree with at all. (Laughs) On a personal level, that was such a big important album for me when I was a kid and just to be compared to something like that is something I would have never expected. I mean in the back of my mind I always knew I would be great up there with that, but I don't think I'm there yet.
So the best is yet to come.
I think so, yeah.
If you were the president of the United States for a day, what were the first three things you would do?
The first three things I would do... Oh jeez... (Laughs) I'd probably... The first thing I would do is I'd try to find someone better for the job. I don't think I'd make a good president. I'd probably just declare it music day and have everybody go out and play music.
Well that's what I want to hear (Laughs)
(Laughs) Ahh, then I would... No seriously I would probably try to place more emphasis on putting money towards the needy. There's just millions of people out there who are hungry and starving. I know there are many programs underway but I would probably research that. Everything is important in politics and the government is choosing and finding priorities. I know that is very difficult but I would have no choice but to say what's best for the country and what interests me most and how can I help people. So I probably would make a lousy president.
So I guess you don't really have any spare time at all and if you do do you do anything besides music?
Well, if I had some spare time I would like to play the guitar, which I almost never get to do. But you know what. I don't know. Once I'm moving and rolling I like to keep moving. Once I get into an energetic state I'm happy to be working. It's fun to take vacations and I'd love to go out on a boat on a lake somewhere and go fishing or something like that, but honestly I've noticed over the last few years that when I'm on vacation I really can't wait to get home and get back to work because every day of my life is really like a vacation. I mean today I'm sitting here and I'm playing guitar in between interviews and all day long I get to talk about music. I mean how great is that?
You're a lucky guy...
Yeah, I'm very lucky haha.
So how would you describe your relationship with Arjen Lucassen?
Ahh, I'm much shorter than he is...
Yeah he is a tall dude...
(Laughs) I think I am a bigger Pink Floyd fan than he is though, but we're both big Pink Floyd fans. No, he's great, you know what, he's probably the nicest guy I have met in the music business and that's saying a lot because I've really met a lot of nice people. But he's also been the most helpful and the guy seems to be really devoid of any ego of who he is or what he does. Just the help he's given me. I can call him and ask for anything and he would not hesitate to help in any way. He's been a big help this entire Room V album, he's helped us in five different ways, I can't get into how but in the thank you's you see his name at it says 'times 5' and that's because his name really should be listed 5 times in the thank you's. He's terrific.
And he has a great sense of humor too.
Yeah he's almost as funny as he thinks he is...
He's pretty funny....
No, I know (Laughs)
So it seems that every other band is releaing some kind of DVD at the moment.
So I've heard...
Does shadow Gallery have any plans in that direction?
We're gonna do a DVD that just lists all the other DVD's that all the other bands are doing and it's gonna be just us commenting on them.
Haha excellent. You've got that question before I can hear.
Well, not too many, only about 15-20 times. No actually we are in the process of putting out a DVD ourselves. Not of a live show but of the making of Room V.
Now that was what I was hoping to hear.
There is a multimedia piece on the bonus disc and that's just a small taste of what it will be like. That's only about 10 minutes long. The DVD we are making will probably be an hour and a half, but it will really get into us working on the songs and trying to record them and discussing them. Us at band meetings, photo shoots and radio interviews and just clips from all sorts of things.
That's what the fans wanna see.
I think so. I think it should be pretty interesting.
Do you have anything else planned for the near future of Shadow Gallery or is just promotion now.
Well, promotion is the key thing and I love promotion. I love the way the business works and the music business is a really scary, shaky, crazy business. It usually doesn't add up and make sense or dollars to the musicians, but I think promotion is a really big part of it. So many bands work on making the record and doing what they can and then they stop. I know you can probably point the finger at me and say 'we should be out there touring and that's promotion'.
In addition to that or aside from that I love doing interviews and I love talking about the record and if someone wants to talk to me about music I have made then I am even more pleased to talk to you about it. But beyond the promotion we have a release party coming up next week. Lots of new merchandise posters and t-shirts that are in the works, the DVD I mentioned and possibly putting together a small fan club CD a little later in the year. Then beyond that, we reall want to focus on writing and starting our next record and probably even more importanly is, trying to find a way that we can get out there and perform and hopefully do some sort of tour of Europe.
I would say thumbs up to that.
Okay (Laughs) Well then it's settled then. We'll see you in a couple of months.
Ok, that was pretty much I wanted to know for now. Do you have anything you want to say that I didn't ask?
Yes, if I was playing a basketball game with Arjen and I gave him a 10 point head start and we were playing to 21, do you think he still would win given a slight advantage?
(Laughs) I think he would win no matter how far ahead you were...
(Big laughter)
I've met him, so I know how tall he is.
(Keeps laughing) Okay, no that's great. I enjoyed the interview very much.
Thank you, I hope we can do it again sometime.
I'm sure we can. I look forward to the next time Steen.
Thanks and good luck in the future man, bye.
Bye.
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Written by Steen - 6/2/2005 |
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