Shannon Shaw, vocalist and bass guitarist of Shannon and the Clams, and her dog Spanky-Joe at a park in the greater Los Angeles area on April 25, 2024. (Jules Hotz for KQED)
O
f all the topics covered in our hour-long Zoom call, one of the few that doesn’t make Shannon Shaw cry a little is pro wrestling great Mick “Mankind” Foley.
“I was in Detroit at the airport really early in the morning. I was like ‘Oh my God, is that Mankind? Holy shit!’” she says. “I was like, ‘You know what? He is the kind of celeb that I’m going to approach, and hopefully he’s as nice as he seems.’ He was so nice! He asked me if I wanted a photo.”
A few years later, she reposted the photo to her Instagram. A subsequent chain of online events led to her and her band, the Clams, going out to lunch with him in Nashville, where they were recording a new album.
In some ways it’s a fitting coda to the past few years of Shaw’s life, which have been filled with one-in-a-million occurrences that brought her a staggering range of experiences, including a friendship with a pro wrestling legend, a dog she loves and the darkest days of her life.
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If you’ve been a local rock ‘n’ roll fan in the last 15 years, you have almost definitely heard Shaw’s voice. It may have been in Oakland retro-tinged punk legends Hunx and his Punx, or in her own band, Shannon and the Clams. The distinctive rasp in her singing voice and her striking personal style made her stand out in a crowded field of local indie acts in the 2010s, leading to a solo record on Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound and large-print appearances with Oakland’s Mosswood Meltdown festival.
The new album from Shannon and the Clams, ‘The Moon Is In The Wrong Place,’ comes out May 10 on Easy Eye Sound. (Easy Eye Sound)
And if you’re plugged into that scene, you likely also know the personal devastation that brought us this new record. In 2022, her fiancé Joe Haener — also a Bay Area rock icon, an in-demand drummer who played with bands like The Dodos, Rock N Roll Adventure Kids and his own band Gris Gris — died in a car crash outside his family farm in rural Oregon. The accident happened in front of a bean field that Shaw says “he was probably planning to harvest like within the next week or something.”
Haener’s passing stunned the local music community, and fans and friends of the couple paid tribute for weeks after: tribute concerts were arranged in his honor, and artists dedicated albums to him. Acclaimed Oakland taqueria Tacos Oscar put his recipe for beans on the menu.
“I really do feel like we have such incredible fans that they’re here for it, you know?” Shaw says of the outpouring of love she received and the anticipation for the new record. “They want to experience the music [on this record] knowing exactly what it’s about. And I just appreciate that so much.”
A love story
Shaw is generally cynical about whether the universe has grand plans for us all — these things tend to come up when you lose someone — but she believes in one notable exception: Joe Haener, and that his existence overlapped with hers at all. “I’m always [doubting myself] like, ‘Yeah you’re probably just looking really hard and making something out of nothing.’ But no,” she says. “There’s too many things.”
Their story starts serendipitously at a strip mall in Tualatin, Oregon. In town for a friend’s wedding, she was looking for a dress at a Lane Bryant a few doors down from a Starbucks. It started pouring, so she ducked into the coffee shop to wait out the rain. Haener’s family farm didn’t yet have internet access, so there he was using the wifi to download some shows to take back with him. “Probably the Garry Shandling show. He loved that shit.”
Shannon Shaw and Spanky-Joe in Los Angeles. (Jules Hotz for KQED)
She’d known Haener previously through the indie music world — and she had a huge, immediate crush on him. “I saw pictures of him and I’m like, ‘Oh my fucking lord. This is like the hunkiest man ever,’” she says, chuckling slightly. “I’m not normally like that, like a —” she makes an “awooga” sound, “but absolutely, Joe Haener, I totally was. Total wolf-[with]-steam-out-of-the-ears.”
After he shyly said hello in that Starbucks and asked if she remembered him, she invited him to be her date to the wedding. He had to be at the farm early the next morning, so he declined. They kept in touch, and in 2017 she met up with him after his birthday party – at 2 a.m., the only time they had to meet up while in the same city. Another suspiciously lucky turn of events unfolded: inclement weather canceled his early-morning flight.
“That’s [how] we became madly in love, [because] a lightning storm trapped him at my house,” Shaw remembers. “And we just played games and got to know each other and were both trying to pretend to not already be in love.” He proposed in 2020, and she moved to Portland to join him near the farm.
Between sorrow and exuberance
Shaw is calling from Los Angeles, where she moved to be close to friends and her support network. Spanky-Joe the dog is nestled sweetly in her lap. “I feel like he saved my life,” she says of Spanky, her voice breaking just a little. “And I just feel like even though Joe never got to meet him, somehow Joe and him crossed paths on the astral plane. And Joe was like, ‘I’m sending you to go take care of Shannon.’”
It’s still hard for her to talk about Haener, and yet, as she’s said on Instagram and says on this call, “All I want to do is talk about Joe.” She spent last year doing just that, transferring her grief and confusion over to The Moon Is In The Wrong Place, which she started writing almost immediately. “I had so much music in my head from the day he died,” she says. “Songs were coming to me.”
The members of Shannon and the Clams are vocalist and bass player Shannon Shaw, guitarist Cody Blanchard, keyboard player Will Sprott and drummer Nate Mahan. The whole band had grown close to Haener before his death. (Easy Eye Sound)
The result revels in the dichotomy of loss. The Moon Is In The Wrong Place stings like a freshly skinned knee, honest in its depiction of grief to the point of being jarring. But it’s also brimming with a naked joy. It’s a celebration of Haener and the lives he touched during his time here.
Opener “The Vow” bludgeons you with that bittersweetness — it’s the song Shaw wrote as a surprise for their wedding. The rest of the Shaw-scribed songs continue in that tone, swinging wildly between sorrow and exuberance. “I’m someone who I think generally can run positive … I just can’t help but see all the extreme, vibrant, beautiful things right next to the really awful realities, you know?” she says.
That describes the time she spent in the bean fields, which became a haven for her and the Haener family in the weeks after the accident. “It was such a gnarly scene, you know? There was, like …” she hesitates a moment and her voice quiets. “Burnt flesh and clothing, and all of his personal stuff from his car … but then being surrounded by blossoms … that was like the first time I had been like ‘OK this is a true juxtaposition,’” she says. “This is like life and death, and they’re … operating in the same exact space.”
That heady swell of emotions changes day by day, and she’s learned to lean into the positive feelings. “This is the deepest sadness I’ve ever felt in my life,” Shaw says, “and I know that will be there forever, but the little bits of joy that I have gotten to experience also feel so fucking good.”
As a culture, we expect art borne of tragedy to pin the creator in place, for them to define themselves by the death of their loved one. We expect them to continuously perform their grief so the rest of us can get a lurid preview of an anguish we can’t know until it happens to us. It’s the joy that Shaw exudes on the album that makes it so novel.
Stalling out in grief isn’t something Haener would want for her, anyway. Staying in one place just wasn’t in his nature. “He’s like the least lazy person on earth,” she says. (She still, occasionally, slips into the present tense when talking about him.) “And that was so inspiring to me.”
So Shaw, as she says on the record, “keep[s] on chooglin’,” meeting a future without Joe Haener in it: “I would love to be able to help anyone see that there’s more to life, and your person would not want you to stop.”
