Creative Process
Wehrkamp has described the creative process involved in creating a Shadow Gallery album as follows:
| “ | One of us will start working on an idea, and work quite a bit with it. Most of the members of Shadow Gallery are audio engineers to one degree or another, and multi-instrumentalists as well.... so an idea can be developed and recorded quite rapidly. Very often the process is to record some "musical idea" first, then have the lyrics fitted in later, at which point the music may be altered or more fitted to some melodic vocal line. Most often Brendt or I programs the drums into one of our drum machines, or sequencers, and we start layering almost immediately. The process usually develops into a two-man songwriting team. We have covered all the 2-man possibilities, and listening to Tyranny, you can hear the different approaches based on which two people start writing the song..such as Chris/Brendt on War for Sale or Out of Nowhere as opposed to Carl/Gary on I Believe or New World Order.
Once the initial demos are recorded by the 2 person-music-only group, the cassettes are made and passed on to everyone else. Then we all think about what else we could add. At this point Carl and Mike take over much of the work, working on vocal melodies, then turning them into lyrical vocal lines. Its a bit of "back and forth" for a while 'till the music and lyric contain the same emotion. Many times our songs change drastically or have parts that are re-written many times. I remember re-writing certain parts of the musical sections for New World Order over and over till it was just right - This is where having everyone else's input can help quite a bit... When the latest tape is met with a round of "Alright!! Wow! That's it!" You know the part was justified in being reworked to its full potential. |
” |
| — excerpted from an October 6, 1999 interview with Gary Wehrkamp, http://www.ram.org/music/articles/wehrkampinterview.html |
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