SHADOW GALLERY's WEHRKAMP: 'I Wouldn't Be Surprised If We Ended Up Not Touring At All'

Get Ready to ROCK! recently conducted an interview with SHADOW GALLERY mastermind Gary Wehrkamp. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

Get Ready to ROCK!: Did you feel, while the [new] album ['Room V'] was being recorded, stressed or under any sort of pressure? Do you have to put yourself in a specific mental position in order to create music, or is it something that comes naturally?

Gary: "You know what? Things like that do tend to happen to me, but usually not in the middle of the recordings. It is a labor of love, and I do love every second of it, but it is also a very big pile of work. In the middle of that, we're trying to make sure that we do bring such emotions across, but it's more like a job — a job to be convincing and to be precocious in what we play and what we say. I don't think that I really open myself up to the full emotion of it until about two months after. I can listen to 'Tyranny' now, and when we did this album, it didn't move me emotionally. I just thought about what was wrong with it, and what I could have done to make it better. That was like an everyday production job: what is weak about this record, and what we can do to improve it. It was about three months later that I could listen to it completely detached. In 'Ghost of a Chance', there are a couple of lines to it that I never realised how good the vocals and the music are together. They now give me goosebumps and move me every time I listen to it. It sounds arrogant to say that, but at that point it was able to move me to the point that I would be able to listen to it like everybody else does. Throughout the entire course of making the record, I didn't hear it the way you hear it. I have a checklist of all the things that we have to do, and the list is very long that I have a very stressful time getting those things done."

Get Ready to ROCK!: I know that you normally don't do things like videos that would help you promote your albums, but now that you’re with a new label, I was wondering if that strategy was to change.

Gary: "We have been talking about it. We actually have a video at works for 'Cliffhanger' — 'Cliffhanger 1' from the album 'Carved in Stone' and 'Cliffhanger 2' from the album 'Legacy'. I joined those two songs together and made one eighteen-minute song out of it, and we have a company that's been doing a video for that. They kind of stopped doing that in order to work for the promotion of 'Room V'...we have been talking about doing a video. We were more interested about doing a 'making of' DVD, since we have videoed a lot of the recording sessions for this new album — down from the early days of the writing sessions and band meetings to trying to record the drums and the rest of the instruments. We are probably going to focus on that, since we have a lot of the footage ready. We have to look on thirty hours of tape, trying to decide which to keep and edit all the interesting parts together."

Get Ready to ROCK!: I was looking on your website, hoping to find any European tour dates, but nothing was to be found. What's the deal here?

Gary: "We're not known for touring — we're not a touring band. We have started talking about it, and honestly it kind of got dropped. So many things have happened in the last six weeks to everybody, and it really has changed our outlook a little bit. We were hoping to be touring after the album came out, but that was not possible for a variety of reasons. Then we started setting our focus on a little further down the line. Even though we are looking sometime in January of February next year, we are hoping to come to Europe then, but we don't have any exact dates or venues scheduled. Honestly, right now it remains to be seen. It's a great idea, we are all excited about doing that, but when it comes down to try to book time to rehearse on that stuff, we cannot seem to be able to agree on a single day. We all have prior commitments — I have prior commitments for every weekend 'till the end of 2006! It's really a challenge to book a tour for 2007 when it's so far away, and we don't know if that's even going to happen...I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up not touring at all."

Read the entire interview at www.getreadytorock.com.