“I’m just giving you my honest feelings,” says Herman Jolly.
“I’m not bitter [about] how Sunset Valley never really worked out at
all.”
To be sure, expectations are a bitch. But whether or not the tight,
catchy, ripping, turn-of-the-millennium Portland indie band was
successful depends on who you ask.
A former booker at Thrasher Presents, and now mastermind of
MusicfestNW, Trevor Solomon sees it differently. “There was this buzz
about them, and they played NXNW,” Solomon remembers. “After that show
at [seminal club] EJ’s the buzz grew exponentially huge. Every song was
getting better and better. On their first record, every song was a
hit.” It could be said that their sound helped define what “indie” came
to mean.
At this point, the story takes a turn for the familiar. Sunset
Valley signed with a major label and spent a year haggling over the
contract. In that time the subsidiary folded and the band was
unceremoniously dropped. They soldiered on, however, through a number
of independent releases and tours, including one inhospitable trip
immediately following 9/11. Despite being close enough to smell it, the
group’s intense local success never really translated outside of
Portland. The wave had crested.
The guys in the band, whose resumes now read like a who’s who of
players and producers (including work with Robert Pollard, Heatmiser,
members of the Decemberists, and others), were growing up. Houses were
bought and children born. The breaks between shows became greater.
Two-odd years ago at MusicfestNW, Sunset Valley held what would’ve been
their final show, but it instead elicited a realization everyone could
agree on: It wasn’t the right way to go out.
Some of the band members were sick. There were fans, friends, and
family who couldn’t attend, and perhaps worst of all, they were
competing with the legendary Zombies playing next door. So when a new
opportunity to properly close the door on Sunset Valley appeared, Jolly
seized it. But make no mistake—this is it. Says Jolly, “We’re not
making a new record, and we’re not becoming active again.”
Whatever the case, Jolly’s not going to disappear. After just
missing his breakthrough, having a kid, and now on the verge of turning
40, he still hasn’t soured on the scene. He’s fronting a new band,
Little Pieces, out of Seattle. And though dreams of fame and fortune
have mostly left the building, he is all the richer for it.
“Everything that I thought meant something at one point, I keep
discovering that they don’t really mean anything,” he says of the music
industry. “But if I can write a great song and make a four-track
recording of it, and nobody ever hears it but me, I’m totally
psyched—then I’ve succeeded.” This last time, however, everyone
will know the songs.