Story by Will Kanellos
Photos by Luke Hausman
“We don’t know where or when we are going,” was the first thing George Schultz of Adventure Galley told me as we sat down to discuss the band’s upcoming plans.
When I’d last spoken with Schultz a few weeks ago, he’d said the Eugene-based band was headed to Mississippi to record their upcoming full-length album. Now, Schultz and bassist Jesse Suihkonen explain, the group had just found out they were not going to Mississippi, nor were they really sure what they were going to do next.
To Schultz’s opening remark, Suihkonen laughingly adds: “Things keep changing like every week. Oh we’re going to Mississippi. Oh we’re going to L.A. No, now we’re going to Mississippi. Wait, now we don’t know where we’re going.”
Until this past Tuesday, Schultz was under the impression that the band was going to Mississippi to work with producer Dennis Herring of Sweet Tea Recording. Herring is a renowned producer who has worked on albums for Wavves, Modest Mouse, Counting Crows, and Elvis Costello. Adventure Galley was going to spend mid-February to mid-March recording with Herring, take a couple weeks off to travel around the area and play shows, and then head back to Mississippi to finish the album. The group would then start a tour or try to get on a tour with a bigger band.
Unfortunately, however, Herring needed a larger budget for what he wanted to do with the album than was was originally planned. Adventure Galley and MySpace Records, the band’s label, decided it was too much money to spend on the band’s first album.
“He’s kind of a big deal, I think is the main thing. He’s a pretty big producer,” Schultz says. “Hopefully we get to work with him in the future, but as of now, being as unknown as we are, we don’t have the money to have this amazing producer do our first album.”
The guys have been in touch with other producers in Los Angeles, including Jason Hill. Hill is a member and producer of the group Louis XIV and has worked with bands including The Killers and New York Dolls. Another producer, David Trumfio, has worked with OK Go, Built to Spill, and Wilco and may be attending Adventure Galley’s concert this Saturday at WOW Hall. The concert was supposed to be their “farewell show,” but, as it turns out, the group will be around for a few more weeks.
“We are deciding on a producer still,” Schultz says. “I feel like we were ready to go and then we had to step back a few weeks and re-decide everything, feel everything out again.”
He adds, “We will know what we are doing soon. We will probably be leaving town in the next couple of weeks.”
Outside of coordinating with producers, Adventure Galley has been working on songs for several months.
“[Adventure Galley members] David [Mills] and Aaron [Johnson] have all these songs and George has been writing songs,” Suihkonen says. “They have all these songs acoustically, so what we’re doing is taking all these songs and putting new orders to them or putting different parts to them.”
According to Schultz, Adventure Galley wants to work on a good amount of the songs in the studio with a producer to get another opinion. “I’m hoping we don’t get into the studio and the producer says ‘I don’t really like that. Let’s do this other song,’” he says. “Still we do have to be open to having a producer’s influence on our album.”
Suihkonen and Schultz are both excited about how the songs are beginning to come together. Much of their EP, The Right Place To Be, was self-produced and brought the group a great deal of success, including a spot on MySpace’s Toyota Music Rock The Space, which they went on to win. Schultz says that when the group went into the studio to record The Right Place To Be, they knew exactly what they wanted to do. But now that Adventure Galley is working on a full-length album, the people they have met with, as well as their manager and label, have advised them to be open to working with a producer.
“I’m actually more excited about the songs on this than I was about the songs on the EP,” Schultz says.
Even though things did not work out with Herring and though they have yet to officially choose a producer, Adventure Galley’s future certainly looks promising. Fuel TV featured the band’s songs “Prelude” and “Knife in the Sail” during their coverage of the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing. The group also received an offer from Disney to have a song featured in the last scene of an upcoming movie, Prom.
“[Adventure Galley member] Brock [Grenfell] was talking to his sister and she said Prom is pretty much High School Musical 4, so I don’t think we are interested,” Schultz says with a laugh. “We have to kind of be careful with how we associate ourselves. Artistically it’s not where we are coming from.”
See Adventure Galley play this Saturday, February 12 at WOW Hall. They will be playing with The Dirty Mittens, a stick and a stone, and the 2010 Ethos Bandest of the Bands winner, Sea Bell.

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