Shannon Shaw says the songs she wrote pre-pandemic seem to have taken on new meaning since the world was gripped by COVID-19. Speaking over Zoom from her cousin’s property because it had “better wifi than where I live”, she tells me the band have been sitting on the new songs for over a year and a half because of the uncertain times we’ve been living through.
“I felt like as we were sitting on it, I felt like everything that I’d written about was coming more real than it already was when I wrote. It was like one of the only records we’ve ever written that I listened to a ton. Normally we write an album and then I don’t really want to listen to it because I’m about to tour on it and hear the songs live a lot. And I just feel like I don’t want to criticize myself too much by listening and being like, I should’ve done this or I should’ve done that, but I had so much time and no shows and no outlets after we finished this record that I listened to it a ton. And I feel very close to it.”
The record in question is Shannon and the Clams‘ sixth album, Year of the Spider, produced by The Black Keys‘ Dan Auerbach who also produced their previous release, Onion. For the album, the band – fronted by bass player, Shaw, and guitarist, Cody Blanchard, on lead vocals with Will Sprott on keyboards and Nate Mahan on drums – returned to Auerbach’s Nashville Easy Eye Sound Studio to craft a mature, reflective and ebullient album built for the current times, on which they have perfected their signature blend of garage-psych, doo-wop, classic R&B, and surf rock.
The album is all about not just persevering through adversity but thriving, and the title speaks directly to Shannon’s relationship with our 8-legged friends.
“My mom has told me since I was baby, that spiders have been drawn to me, which is kind of weird, creepy and I’ve always taken issue with them because they really do. They drop right into my face out of nowhere. They get my hair. Cody pulled one out of my hair just the other day. They just are drawn to me and I’ve always thought of them as you know, my worst nightmare. My biggest fear. They’ll ruin my day. And I just went through so many weird, hard things in the last couple of years that I decided to try and reframe. I had a, like a peeping tom stalker kind of thing go on for nine months. And it was kind of ruining my life, especially with the onset of the pandemic and everything. I just decided that I needed to try and reframe it so I wouldn’t just be living in terror at all times. And so I guess reframing my relationship with the spider is symbolic of that whole year trying to, you know, get some power back. So now I have to look at the spider as a creator. In fact, I saved one from a swimming pool yesterday. I never killed them because when I was a kid, I felt like they got revenge on me, if I killed one or if my mom killed one for me or something. So I never want to kill them. I always make people take them outside. But normally if I saw one drowning in a pool, I would probably turn the other cheek. I saved this one’s life and it probably went on to do something really cool with its life.”
Cody explains how the songs on this record touch on some difficult subjects but he’s found a new way to tell stories through the music.
“I think the themes of a lot of Shannon’s songs are of just going through a bunch of difficult stuff all at once and having to make really hard decisions. Like Mary Don’t Go was about her roommate having to make the choice to move out of their house because of this peeping tom and other things that were going on. And then making this decision for Shannon to move up to Portland, which was a really tough decision. For me, I’ve been talking about this a lot, but I sort of took this experiment of focusing on writing other people’s stories as songs, which is really cool for me and worked really well. I think because maybe I have a fiction writing background, so it was just a little easier for me or something. I don’t know. I feel like kind of uncomfortable doing kind of like confessional personal songs, you know, it’s just kind of intense. Yeah, so I was just sort of pulling intense stories from other places. There was actually a bunch of songs that didn’t get on the record that I really liked, I felt like almost like the storytelling I was doing there with the stories were more interesting and I liked where the stories were going and how I told them, but the songs didn’t work as well, you know, versus some songs that just sorta worked better and sounded better, but it’s not as clear lyrically what the story is again.”
Dealing with traumatic life situations lyrically, however, does now translate to the vibe Shannon and the Clams give out, particularly in a live environment. One journalist stated that their shows “are among the best in the world, with an inexhaustible spirit and a musical style with no equivalent. Its influence on the independent scene is one of the greatest, together with Ty Segall and very few others.” So how do the band keep things so positive while singing about such tough subjects?
“I think that that comes naturally to me,” says Shannon. “I mean we’re pretty naturally joyous people and I think a survival skill is to have to make yourself find the positives and find the light spots in the darkness. And I think that when you put two extreme opposite feelings next to each other, they kind of bolster one another and make the feeling stronger. So I feel like presenting sad subject matter, but with like a positive or hopeful or uplifting vibe, it delivers the message differently, or like the parts of the song that you can really feel the depth of the sad aspects of it. It makes you feel it more, I think.”
Watch the full interview with Shannon and Cody below:
Year Of The Spider is out now on Easy Eye Sound
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