STACK #202 Aug 2021

MUSIC FEATURE

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Shannon and the Clams, L-R: Nate Mahan, Cody Blanchard, Shannon Shaw,Will Sprott

INTERVIEW

SHANNON SHAW & CODY BLANCHARD SHANNON & THE CLAMS

Like an ice-cream sundae with an eyeball on top, Cali garage-psych-surf cats Shannon & the Clams serve the sweet with the sinister; new album Year Of The Spider – released on Dan Auberach's Easy Eye label – presents some of the best fun you can have in a bolo tie. Read the whole shebang online @ stack.com.au. Words Zoë Radas

occurrence. I know that when we’re doing things live, things get more dramatic. Especially me! I’m like, “No, slow it way... down... now pick it up! ” That is very important to me, and I think we naturally do that as a unit while recording. I think we try to be on time but there's, I don’t know, I probably push against that. I like that more organic timing. If the band's in time with one another , does it even matter? C: It used to really bother me. I would always want to be very exact, but now I don’t care. It differentiates us from a lot of pop music, or even indie music. Everything is, sort of at its core, made in a computer. Everything is perfectly in time, and you’re not even really that conscious of it. But you can tell when you listen to something that’s not timed, and I’ve sort of embraced that. The band I always think about is the Rolling Stones, because they’re like kind of janky, y'know? Like, it sounds f-cked up, they’re a little bit sh-tty, and people like that.

Like the bit with the nail in the foot, but it's actually hundreds of nails, and they're all rusty, so the creep gets tetanus, but if he dies then you only did it indirectly? S: Yeah! Rusty nails! And when he’s stuck on the rusty nails he falls through a trapdoor into a dungeon of rabid raccoons who tear him to shreds and rip his b-lls off. I’m just hoping he’s dead now or something. I moved away – I had to move – but

The story of this magnificent album's title track is just unreal – Shannon, your beloved father became very ill while you were also dealing with a pernicious peeping-tom slash stalker. Could you give us an epilogue to the tale? (We hope your dad is recovered, and the stalker is in jail.)

S: My dad’s doing pretty good right now. They're just keeping an eye on things for now. He’s so positive the whole time, which really helped me and my siblings stay positive. As for the creep, I have no idea. No one could do anything. The police were basically like, ‘You’re going to have to catch him red- handed attacking you or your

I ended up making friends with all these other women in my neighbourhood who he was stalking, and I just have this hope that they all come together and are able to tackle him and beat the sh-t out of him. That would have been good revenge.

I felt like they were telling me, 'Dude, just kill him, it's fine.'

It’s tricky, 'cos it’s so much easier if you [computerise your music]. But it also depends on what your definition of ‘easy’ is. In some ways it’s easier to get five people together and screw around...

roommates; that’s all we can do’. It didn’t matter if they had footage, fingerprints, footprints, nothing. C: I remember talking about this. Didn’t [the police] tell you to get a gun or something? S: The police told me to arm myself, and if I felt threatened, to “do whatever I had to do.” So I felt like they were telling me, “Dude, just kill him, it’s fine.” I really wanted to booby-trap the house like Home Alone .

One of the joyous things about your music is it isn't

perfectly in time; you couldn't set a computerised metronome to these songs, because they slow down or speed up like a climactic Nancy Sinatra track. Do you do this deliberately? S: I think it’s a pretty organic

Year Of The Spider by Shannon and the Clams is out August 20 via Easy Eye/ Concord.

Continue reading the full interview online at stack.com.au

10 AUGUST 2020

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