Shannon and the Clams by Jim Herrington

Colored by Grief

After an unimaginable loss, Shannon Shaw is “alchemizing the pain.”

Band life is often a slog with long drives, takeaway meals, and unfamiliar venues. But on a recent tour in Australia, Shannon Shaw and her bandmates in the doo-wop-meets-garage act Shannon and the Clams found time on the road to pepper in a few outdoor adventures. “I don’t know if it’s just the sunshine, but the people are so exhilarated, and they have a lot of gratitude for you making the trek,” Shaw says about her trip Down Under. “And you feel that energy.”

Shannon and the Clams will soon headline a PureHoney show in another grateful, sunny, southern place when they perform on April 11 at Respectable Street in West Palm Beach.

The trip to Australia was a much-needed reprieve for Shaw whose life has been colored by grief after an unimaginable loss in August of 2022. The singer and bassist was headed to her bachelorette party in Reno, Nevada, when she got a call from the sister of her fiancé Joe Haener. Haener, a 41-year-old drummer with longstanding ties to California’s Bay Area music scene, had been gravely injured in a car accident near his family’s farm in Oregon.

Shaw frantically reached out to all her support systems, including her therapist and astrologer, and even posted on Instagram, she says, “asking for people to send good vibrations and prayers.” And when she learned that Haener had not survived his injuries, she felt the need to update her followers. That’s when something unexpected happened: Telling her story online became therapeutic. “I opened the dam and just kept sharing,” Shaw says.

That vulnerability has been essential to the process of healing, and well worth any risks. The Internet, even with its dark corners and trolls, became a place where she could connect with others who had experienced immense loss. “I’m raw. All my skin has been rubbed off, is how it feels,” she says. And even strangers who felt the same way were generous in relating how they coped — things to do and what to avoid.

Her openness, in turn, gave others solace, too. “Finding that grief community, a widow community, I couldn’t have really done that keeping quiet and sticking with my friends — who are fucking amazing and who really showed up for me,” Shaw says. “But none of them have ever lost the love of their life the day of their bachelorette party, a couple of weeks before their wedding.”

Shaw, like Haener, got her musical start in the Bay Area, but the couple made their home in Oregon. After Haener’s death, Shaw relocated to Los Angeles. It was there she found a weekly grief group where she was headed after our interview.

“I hate missing it,” she says of the regular meeting. “It’s my one day a week when I feel so seen. I don’t even have to talk. Everyone is in there because they are suffering the loss of someone.” Shaw compares it to coming home after a long day and taking off uncomfortable shoes, unbuttoning too-tight jeans. “Everyone gets it,” she says. In the grief group, she cries almost the whole time, “I don’t know where else I can do that, and it feels good,” she says, adding, “I want to cry with people who are on the same level.”

Haener’s absence guided the band’s next album, The Moon Is in the Wrong Place, released last May. Written by Shaw, guitarist Cody Blanchard, keyboard player Will Sprott and drummer Nate Mahan, the album was produced by longtime collaborator, Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys. The title came from something Shaw’s fiancé had once said in conversation that enchanted her. “This record is the most important thing I’ve done in my life,” Shaw says.

The album has also struck a chord with fans. At shows, people know all the words and sing along with complicated songs. Shannon and the Clams are following it up with a deluxe vinyl bundle edition that Shaw describes as “a new opportunity to see the album differently.” It includes two songs — “Wax & String” and “I’m a Fool” — that were cut from the original album because they weren’t as directly related to its themes of loss. They’re tracks she loves, but for an album that she says was made with “intention and purpose,” editing them out in the first round was necessary. “Restraint is powerful,” she says. Her other band, Hunx and His Punx, likewise set aside work on an in-progress album after Haener’s death and have resumed recording with a different perspective on the songs.

Shannon and the Clams by Jim Herrington

Shaw remains industrious, creating work in more than one medium that reflects her new reality. “Putting the energy of this nightmare into anything creative is the best thing I can be doing,” she says, “Alchemizing the pain.”

Shaw and about 30 of her friends have a “Friendship Film Festival” for informally sharing movies they make on their mobile phones, and Shaw says her next project for the group will have higher production values and a premise she calls allegorical. Sick of being herself, Shaw one day discovers her AI doppelgänger dropped at her doorstop, and trains the double to replace her in daily life so the real Shannon Shaw can disappear.

She’s also writing a book about her love story with Haener and about her loss that will include her artwork as well as resources for those who are grieving. “I think it’s going to be like a survival guide,” she says. “It’s been very important to me to keep moving, keep processing, and lend hands wherever I can.”

Shaw knows there’s no hiding from the grief. She thinks of the future she and Haener planned together, children they might have had, a shared retirement in a cabin. “It’s going to keep unfolding,” she says. “It’s part of me for the rest of my life … and absolutely part of my art.”

PureHoney presents Shannon and the Clams w. Being Dead and Las Nubes, 8pm Friday, April 11 at Respectable Street in West Palm Beach. GET TICKETS! shannonandtheclams.com ~ Liz Tracy