August 2022 found Oakland vocalist Shannon Shaw just weeks away from a storybook wedding with her fiancé Joe Haener, a drummer and fellow Bay Area music staple. Instead, Haener passed away in a car crash just outside of his family’s vegetable farm in Oregon in a catastrophic loss that rocked both Shaw and her bandmates to their very core. The moon is in the wrong place, indeed. It was out of this tumultuous aftershock that the band’s momentous seventh record was born.
The album opens with “The Vow,” a Nancy Sinatra-style ballad that perfectly sets the tone for the entire bittersweet LP. Defined by sweeping declarations of love, it’s a song that is simultaneously devastating when one considers the context: Shaw wrote it to surprise Haener on their wedding day. “I hated the idea of him never getting to hear it,” Shaw explains.
“Oh So Close, Yet So Far,” one of the project’s standouts, is an earth-shattering testament to love’s everlasting glow. Characterized by uptempo soundscapes that fall somewhere between Paul Anka’s “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” and the Arctic Monkeys’ “She’s Thunderstorms,” the track listens like a classic 1950s love song dipped in West Coast garage rock.
And while Shaw laments that “the moon is in the wrong place” on the album’s frenetic, melancholic title-track, she knows she must find a way to move forward despite. “So Lucky,” too, is a testament to the enduring glow of Haener’s presence in her life, arriving as a song that plays out like an ode of gratitude for having experienced true love even if your partner is no longer here. “Thank you for all you built into my heart,” Shaw sings, before avowing how she “will remain forever changed.
It’s this very acceptance that illuminates a path forward for Shannon and The Clams, creating a bright ray of hope showcased on “Bean Fields” . An upbeat track that highlights the beauty present amidst tragedy and the enduring, ever-brilliant and rapturous chemistry between Shaw, guitarist Cody Blanchard, drummer Nate Mahan and keyboardist Will Sprott, it’s a touching song that’s arguably the best on the album—and the most joyful, and maybe one of the band’s riskiest.
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