California band Shannon and the Clams’ “The Moon Is in the Wrong Place” is the celestial title track off an album tinged with devastation, memory, a higher power, and a unique strength coursing throughout.
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Stream: “The Moon Is In The Wrong Place” – Shannon & The Clams
There are premonitions, moments, memories that never are never far out of reach – hanging in the background, in orbit, almost like the moon.
What does the moon have to do with SoCal surf-tinged ripper of a rock track? For Shannon and the Clams, everything. The title track from their forthcoming May 10th record The Moon Is In The Wrong Place looks to the sky for answers, finding few.
Shannon Shaw, the group’s founder, vocalist and bassist, had her world upended when her fiancé, Joe Haener, died in a car crash in August 2022.
On the track, Shaw speaks to the tragedy in a way that’s unafraid and focused – as well as an homage to her late fiancé not long before his tragic accident.
“He was trying to ask me what was going on astrologically. He said, ‘What’s going on in the stars right now?’” “He was basically asking if Mercury was in retrograde,” Shaw says in a statement. “But he was like, ‘What is it you say? The moon is in the wrong place?’ I was like, ‘That is so weird and cool.’ And he turned out to be right — the moon IS in the wrong place.”
It’s enough to make anyone stop in their tracks and consider the deeper meaning of “all” of it.
Produced by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, the record arrives on Auerbach’s eclectic Easy Eye Sound label, a suitable home for the varied sonic stylings of Shannon and the Clams.
The partnership with Auerbach is one that dates back to 2018’s Onion and 2021’s Year Of The Spider, perhaps delivering a touch of reassurance in a time of intense grief.
Released on January 25, “The Moon Is In The Wrong Place” slinks and whirs to life in groovy, frenetic fashion, like a fever dream from Pulp Fiction, but with a much deeper message at play.
The sun burned down when you left this world
Now there is some imposter in the sky
Look for you in starlight,
eyeballs searching skies for satellites
“Losing Joe made me unafraid of so many things,” Shaw shares. “I have a lot less fear. It’s given me new perspective. Baring my soul is so much less scary than it would’ve been before.”
Touches of garage, surf and psych rock dot the landscape that is the Clams’ discography, and a sense of ambition and an ear for innovation is never far out of reach. They haven’t shied away from devastation, or from the spotlight that comes with it, either.
Colors changed when you lеft this world
Now everything’s a whiter shade of mauve
I’m seeing bright spots,
shining objects that you use for those you love
I spy seafoam, I spy olive, I spy golden candlelight
I spy something that you told me in the last week of our lives
The significance of the effort, of months of working through demos to craft the upcoming LP – as opposed to bringing mostly finished, well-crafted songs to the table (to paraphrase keyboard player Will Sprott) also proved an uncanny approach for the quartet.
“We all felt the urgency of making something that reckoned with this meteor that smashed into our planet,” Sprott says in a statement. “This is the most focused record we’ve ever done, as far as everything coming from a singular traumatic event.”
Tour dates stretch from Columbus to Minneapolis from May through June, including a late May stop at Brooklyn’s fittingly eccentric Polish community center and concert hall Warsaw.
One imagines a warm welcome is in store for an album that should defy convention, if its recent sonically rich, hauntingly memorable singles are any indication (title track very much included).
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© Jim Herrington
© Jim Herrington
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