Shannon & The Clams

Published Jul 23, 2024, 9:00 AM

Shannon & The Clams were long time regulars in the Bay Area music scene. The band’s two main songwriters—Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard met in college in Oakland, California. They remained there for about a decade until a number of events set them adrift physically and spiritually.

The band’s new album, The Moon Is In the Wrong Place, is taken from a phrase Shannon’s fiancé, Joe Haener uttered shortly before his passing. Much of the album is anchored around Shannon’s grief. On today's episode Justin Richmond talks to Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard about moving away from Oakland, the aftermath of losing a loved one, and about their Dan Auerbach-produced album, The Moon Is In The Wrong Place.

You can hear a playlist from Shannon's late fiancé, Joe Haener, HERE.

Pushkin. The band Shannon and the Clams were longtime regulars in the Bay Area music scene. The band's two main songwriters, Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard, met in college in Oakland, California, and remained there for about a decade until a number of events set them adrift, not only physically but also spiritually. There was a tragic ghost ship warehouse fire in twenty sixteen that killed thirty six people attending the show in Oakland. Then there was a danger situation where Shannon was a victim of a stalker, and if that weren't enough, there was also the death of Shannon's fiance only weeks before their wedding day. The band's new album, The Moon Is in the Wrong Place, is taken from a phrase Shannon's fiancee, Joe Hayner, uttered shortly before his passing. It's also the record's moving title track. Much of the new record is a Shannon's grief, but there's also tender moments like the Vow, a song Shannon had written to surprise Joe on their wedding day. I spoke to Shannon, Sean Cody Blanchard about moving away from Oakland the aftermath of losing a friend in fiance and about their Dan Aarbach produced record, The Moon Is in the Wrong Place. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's my conversation with Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard of Shannon and the Clams. When the single The Moon Is in the Wrong Place first came out, and when I realized it was the album title, my thought was it might be one of the better album titles in recent memory. And then when I read the backstory, I got a little bummed out. I was like, where it comes from makes it even better in a sense. But it's obviously just a brutal way to come to it. And I don't know what degree you want to talk about it or Shannon, but you know, I don't know how to talk about this, so sorry.

Well, we're not raised to talk about it or trained generally in America. It really seems.

Like just so not a part of our culture.

You know.

The funeral marks the end of your time to publicly deal with with the loss. But I'm not going that route. I can't go that route. It's not sustainable to me.

What was your relationship with sort of life and death prior to this experience, and has it evolved if it has at.

All, It's yeah, it's evolved a lot. You know.

I've lost my grandparents who I loved but I was not very close with. And we had someone who used to drum for us years ago committed suicide and that was definitely hard. And then I would say the ghost Ship fires, was.

It definitely? Yes? Yeah, that definitely took a lot out of us.

You know, It's that occurred in like the same kind of spaces that we frequent and you know, came up playing and had had some friends in there and everyone was just maybe one or two degrees away from us. So it was that was a really hard one. But nothing has affected me like this before ever. I think just having it be something from inside of my life disrupting every part of my life and changing my future.

Drastically.

Yeah. How long after you lost your partner, Shannon, did you feel that you could reasonably move forward with music again?

Pretty quick? Right?

Yeah?

I never thought of it quite in those terms, because when I write music, it's usually coming from a place of I need to get something out of me.

You know.

The way I make music is it's processing emotions, so it shouldn't be a surprise that that's the route I took. I mean, since I was a little kid making up songs. I started making up songs when I was really young, five or so and not playing music. I never ever, I never thought i'd be a musician. That was a huge surprise to me, and I didn't start playing anything till I was twenty five. But it's always been a form of self soothing to me, and now I see it as processing too, So songs started coming to me right away.

What was the first song to come to you?

I feel like it was maybe the bean Fields, not like the melody or the music, but the concept and maybe life is unfair? Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, we were spending so much time just sitting in this crop. I don't know if you know, but Joe's pickup flipped into the bean field that he tended, and himself. I don't know, it's ironic, I guess, but yeah, just me and his family and some friends just ended up spending so much time just sitting out there, you know, surrounded by this madness, you know, as a real juxtaposition between life and death, being surrounded by all these blossoms, and bees buzzing, and you know, the beans starting to come in, and then this big burnt out hole in the earth where his pickup had been, and we just ended up spending so much time there that I eventually hauled out this camping. Matt and me and his sister Beth would just lay out there night and day, and eventually we dragged out chairs and a table and would meet there like every night and listen to music and talk and watch the meteor shower that had been going on.

And I think.

Being in that environment made me feel really inspired and blown away that I could still appreciate anything, and nature became a really big, in your face, in my face inspiration and just being able to appreciate it in a new way and just kind of living in awe.

Were you starting to trend that way? I mean, you had moved to, you know, your partner's farm outside of Portland, and from what I gathered was a pretty, you know, like beautiful piece of land. So I mean, were you starting to trend towards being a person inspired by nature anyway? Or was that period of morning more of a time where that happened.

I mean, I've always loved nature, grew up in the country, and I've always wanted I mean, I spent sixteen years I think in Oakland and then two years in Portland. I would go back and forth between Portland and the farm. But I've always been a lover of nature, but it totally changed. I just started to take certain things really seriously, like feeling overwhelmed by the sunsets that we were seeing and overwhelmed by plants and bugs, and I felt like a new relationship with them.

Yeah, that Beanfields is one of my favorite songs on the album, along with the title track. There's a couple others you so Lucky the vow, but bean Fields feels like a For it to be one of the first songs you'd written is surprising to me because it feels like it's coming from a person who's fully, fully processed things and fully I don't know, it seems like such a beautifully you know, given the circumstances, like a beautifully formed way of thinking about happened.

Thanks.

I think that one is something that really surprised me that I felt soon after the loss was gratitude and that, you know, it's a concept that I've always understood, but I think it wasn't until this event where I felt it like deep within me, like I have been so deeply grateful to have had Joe for the amount of time I've had him, and I feel like definitely forever changed by having his influence in my life, and I feel like I still am being inspired by him as a person. I constantly asked myself like, WWJD, what would Joe do? You know, I'm like using him as a moral compass oftentimes, and I think that was part of the joy that you feel in the bean Fields. I was afraid of that song at first because when I started really working on it, that's all that was coming out of me, was like a joy, a celebration and appreciation. I was so surprised to be writing something upbeat, and I was afraid to embrace that because I was like, is that disrespectful or is it too weird? Too soon to put a joyous song on there? And you know, I answered, have answered my own question, and it's no, absolutely not. You know this, this grief has been a really massive range, you know, of emotions, and I think with the extreme depths of depression and darkness and nothingness that I've experienced, I've also experienced sheer joy and celebrating feels so important.

Yeah, and really.

Grasping any bits of light that I can find is so important to my survival.

I'm so happy to hear that. I'm grateful that you've sort of found the strength or the sensibility or the courage or to handle it the way that you have. It's been the rough kind of beautiful to watch as well.

Thank you, Thank you.

Yeah, Cody, As someone who's known Shannon, like you know obviously a very long time, how has the last couple of years been for you?

I mean, right after Joe Dive was just fucking completely shattering.

It was just like.

Total destruction for me. And then to watch your friend have to go through this and deal with this is like, yeah, it's just annihilating. Just everything stopped, you know, like we just didn't do anything else, just cancel everything. Yeah, and you know, Shannon came and stayed at our house for a while because she was living in Portland. But obviously like didn't want to go back to their apartment. I mean I even had a hard time going in there and I didn't even live there. I tried to just i don't know, be like a point of light or be like the kind of friend that Shannon was used to, So be present and not like try to force anything, you know, not try to like really force Shannon to talk about what she was feeling or what's going on, and to like allow moments of levity or find a little moments of like joy or humor, you know, when we could.

Yeah, how long after Shannon wrote Beanfields did you hear it or see it? I don't know if the words came first or if everything sort of came together.

I guess probably December or January, so that was probably like four months because we didn't really get together to work on stuff until January.

How did you feel about the things coming in? The songs coming in from Shannon?

We were trying to we keep talking about this. We were trying to find another instrument for Shannon to write on, and someone told Shannon to get an omnichord because you can just push buttons and like it plays chords for you, and it has a drum machine in it. So that was I thought was really cool because it I think it removed the like translation step because there's often Shannon's writing on bass and then we're trying to find these chords that work with you know, what she's singing or you know, like if you play a bass note and then you sing a melody on top of it, it informs like what the key it's in or what chords would work.

With it, right, and then if you change the bass note or something, it would totally change the.

Between those two notes. But it like removed that translation kind of step. And then Shannon could just like play around with all these different weirdo chords and I think write more freely.

And then so like we're the demos with omni chord on them that you're hearing, Yeah, that's pretty cool. Like how did that inform? I guess what you do? Then? As a guitar player, must have just given you like a kind of a pretty strong blueprint for what to do. I guess.

Yeah, it's still has to get glued together, and I think like backing vocals and harmonies and stuff still come to you know, like Shannon usually has an idea for a backing vocal, but it's just it's different when we all get together because we bring different like we sing in different ranges and have different ideas, and we tried, we tried to like have a more free form, you know, like jam session where we were coming with really incomplete ideas. But I don't know. It was cool and it was fun, but we didn't actually produce that much usable stuff. It just felt like everything was like upside down and we could try anything.

Yeah, right, it felt like a good time just to try a new playbook maybe, But.

The stuff we kept from it was really stuff that had been pretty well like written before because we were recording in March and that's started in January, so it wasn't like a ton of time to write stuff.

Yeah, I was writing on the on the code for you.

It opened up a whole new world.

I mean, it just made I was just over flowing with ideas that I couldn't capture because I just felt too limited on the bass. That's how I normally write songs. And I only know a handful of guitar chords. And I'm not a good guitar player at all. I'm not even an okay guitar player.

Do you try? Do you try?

I try? I try.

Yeah. Joe actually made me learn a few guitar chords in twenty twenty. It was important to him that I learn a few. He was like, just trust me, you're gonna love it.

You're gonna get it. It's just gonna help you. You're gonna love it.

And I was so resistant because I hate being bad at stuff. And that's actually kind of how I wrote the vow. I used the chords he taught me and wrote that song.

Wow.

Yeah, that's the one song that was written before he died because I was going to perform it at our wedding as a surprise to him. Yeah, but yeah, it was going to be that really simple, simple song, and it made me furious that he was never going to get to hear it. You know, I would never written it if he hadn't convinced me that I should learn a few chords. And I did get really addicted to guitar during lockdown, and it.

Had become a great tool to me.

I never got good, but yeah, I was really sad for some reason that detail. Of all of the things that I was mad about, I kept coming back to that song and it was just so naive, you know, it was so full of hope and joy and was it and when I.

Was the happiest I've ever been in my whole life.

You know.

Yeah, So I guess I wanted that to be on the album to tell the story of, like, look how fucking happy I was, you know, like we had our lives like together, things were going great, and.

That song was just such a symbol.

Of of how much I believed in our union and how proud I was. So I guess I just wanted to kind of share with people how it felt for everything to stop. And that's essentially what we put the Vow next to our Glass too, because I feel like those two songs together some up that nightmarish journey, you know, of the beginning.

Yeah, we'll be right back with more from Shannon and the Clams after this break. We're back with Shannon and the Clams. When did you decide to put the Vow on the album or to revisit it as a song?

And rework it and I didn't show anyone until we were at this session in January when we were writing together, and I was like, knew that it would could be potentially cruel, you know, I never know how real to get, and I decided to just be like completely real, like I'm going to just share the devastation because I can't I can't hold it by myself.

When you say you in the past or you know, you're never sure how real to get, Like, what do you think that instinct.

Is protecting people? Also, it's just hard. It's hard and exhausting to be so vulnerable all the time. Yeah, lately, I'm just talking about my grief with press because y'all are asking.

And I do find myself.

Keeping certain thoughts to myself because they're so sad. I don't want to like take someone's innocence away by by sharing them like with them, like some of the extreme darkness that I live with now, you know. Yeah, but I don't you know, I'm also really open, but if no one's asking, I'm not usually bringing it out currently.

Yeah, do you prefer do you prefer people not to add? I mean, where are you at with them?

I want people to ask because it's my life now, this is my life, this is all I think about. And what is weird to me is if you are someone who loves me, friends or family wise, and it doesn't come up, you don't bring it up, you don't check on me or something that is disturbing to me. Yeah. I like to think of it as a dresser. I like to think of my relationships as a big dresser, and some of those people previously that were in my top drawer have had to go to the bottom drawer. I love them, But going back to what we first talked about, you apologize and said, I'm sorry, I don't know how to talk about this stuff.

We do not know how to talk about it.

We don't and I don't blame anyone for that, but some people are a lot better than others at it, you know, instinctual, and like give me the space, you know, bring it up and check in with me, and then give me.

The space I need to talk about it.

And that to me, that's like invaluable. And I honestly have a list of friends that have provided that kind of a space for me. And I've just had to let other friends and family that I thought could could hold me there and could be there, I've just had to put them in the bottom drawer.

Yeah, have you been handling this just purely instinctually? I mean I've been doing therapy. Well, how do you like, how are you finding the words and the processes to reprioritize and I mean all these things that you're saying me, it's just like, yeah, I'm kind of stunned that you're able to do all this, you know, consciously.

Thank you.

I I would say a lot of it is instinctual. But I did join a grief group. Someone connected me with a grief counselor right away, so I've had her, and then I have a grief group, which has been really helpful. But years ago, I did therapy off and on, and I still have a relationship with my old therapist. I haven't talked to him in a while now because I can't afford three different therapies.

But I'm glad to know you have the same problem as me. It's like I need therapy.

Yeah, It's that's really sad to me because I think, no matter what you've going you've been going through, you don't have to have had a, you know, life changing death. I think that everyone needs therapy just to learn how to like communicate with each other. I think that having that therapy years ago put me in a much better place. I really like encourage everyone I know to have therapy. But now the grief group has been so good for me. I think being with other people who lost people in different ways, different scenarios, different relationships, just I mean, you already from a loss like this, you already gain a lot of perspective, which I wasn't expecting. But like, things that were so important to me before are totally not you know, those dresser drawers have moved around on their own, and a lot of the noise gets cleared out of life. Like a lot of the little things that stressed me out gave me anxiety, you know, those the important things are like bursting out of the top. Wow, and so much further away from from the little noise. But hearing other people's grief journeys, I guess you would call it is amazing. And I feel so grateful to have this group of people to be with every week, because I can have the most supportive, wonderful friends, but being with someone who's suffered anything close to similarly like it's it's kind of one of the only places where I feel like I can let my hair down. Yeah, you know, and like I liken it too. When I get to that group, I feel like I can like unbutton a tight pair of genes.

Oh you know, do you feel like your writing's kind of forever impacted?

I do, because I guess going back to what I was trying to say about perspective and the important things like blasting to the top and the noise settling down at the bottom. I think that it's changed my fears. You know, I'm like just not as afraid to do anything. I'm not as caught up on worrying what people will think, or I'm not as afraid to try things. You know, about our session we did in January to go over demos and try to jam. I hated jamming, you know, like it's not very me. I normally need to do a lot of preparing, and I did. I had a lot of things prepared. But also to just go in with nothing and just jam off like what one of the guys in the band brought, that is very different for me. So to sit there and like experiment in front of people, that's like, you know, you may as well be in the nude, right, I may as well be in the dude. So I think that that fear has just changed. I am not worried about being judged at all, And I'm sure.

A lot of it is.

Just that that extreme loss is the change of perspective. But I also honestly feel like Joe's wisdom has imprinted itself upon me, like he is someone that was not afraid of anything like that, and if I were to be like, well, I'm Joe, I'm afraid to jam, he would be like, what, just do it?

You know.

He's definitely like a just do it kind of guy and wouldn't want me to wasting my time being afraid of trying things. So I think that my sign rating is just like less afraid. Yes, I was concerned about making things too sad for people, but now I'm not. Now I'm just like sorry, this is my life and so far our fans are very here for it, which has been beautiful.

Yeah. Well, I mean the music is really really good too, you know, which, which of course always helps. Like it's not you know, I don't think anyone is having to no one's having to pretend to be here for anyone's sake. Like it's really really good news.

Yeah, you know, it's thank you. I actually I really do feel.

I also feel this like confidence that I don't think I ever had before, and that I think that if people had no idea what happened, I believe that this is a really fucking good album. I am totally confident that no matter what the content is this album is great.

I feel really proud and I do think.

That we all did a beautiful job like contributing, like our hearts and our talent.

I would like to talk a little bitbout the recording process, and maybe Cody can speak to some of that. How do you move Cody from the jam session and the kind of gathering songs you've written and working them out together part to the recording part. How did that move along for this particular album.

I think the hardest part of deciding what to keep and what to work on, what to cut out because we just have too much material. So we're often like keeping a big list of songs and.

Then trying to.

Decide like which ones we love and which ones we should get rid of.

How do you guys negotiate that?

I don't know. It's like sometimes it actually just comes down to like we didn't decide and we ran out of time, and so something doesn't get recorded, like we have like five days to record or something, and then it's sort of like, okay, well, these four like we didn't decide which ones we're gonna keep, and then we just ended up recording one of them, and then we just like ran out of Top. Yeah, maybe that's like a subconscious way of making the decision, because you if that's the song that you like put off recording, like maybe it's not that good or you don't like it that.

Much, certainly makes the decision easier. It makes it less of a conscious decision in the sense, you know.

Yeah, but then the stuff you're really excited to get down is like you record that first.

Do you guys talk to like Dan about it when you guys are gonna go into the studio with him, or do you like run stuff by him?

No.

I feel like we've like sent him demos before and I don't think he really listened to them. He likes to just do stuff live in the studio, Like I don't think he likes to Yeah.

His reaction is like awesome, get in here.

It's like he would rather you show up with nothing and then you write everything like in the studio and just like record it as you're going. And he's like, also, just whatever we want to do. He's like, yeah, let's record that whatever whatever you guys.

Want or the ever times you're you're looking for a more decisive opinion.

Yeah, not from Dan, But I just wish. Yeah, we do kind of wish there was someone who would just say, like, no, this is bad, don't do this one. They'll do it with takes for sure, and like what we're doing on the songs, like this is working, this isn't working. But I wish, Yeah, it would be nice to have some outsider. I mean that's what I feel like. The Beatles had that with their producer and their manager were like just so involved in shaping the sound and like deciding what songs.

Yeah, I wish there were more George Martin's in the.

World, you know, I wanted George Martin and Brian.

Yeah.

Yeah, It's like it's just nice if you have someone who's like fifth or sixth member kind of meddling and like, you know, tightening things up.

Yeah. Do you feel similarly, Shannon.

Yeah, for sure.

I think it's always good to have like an outside, trusted person to help you with editing.

After one last break, we're back with the rest of my conversation with Shannon Shaw and Cody Blanchard of Shannon in the Clans. We're back with the rest of my conversation with Shannon and the Clams. I keep going back to it, but It just really is one of my favorites. I love it so much. The moon is in the wrong place, the act on the song. I love how the second verse is the first verse with added sort of thoughts, you know, a few more lines. It's a really cool way to go about that, just give it an extra emotion. You're repeating the first few lines of the first or the entire first first, and then to stretch it out and to add the icy SpaceX and all that. It was just like, whoa, it was really cool.

Thank you.

Did you write it that way? Did that come through jamming it or how did that particular device come about?

I think I brought it the song pretty much fully formed, right, Cody.

I almost feel like that like came down in the studio, like having the intro and with a half first and then like coming back.

Oh definitely this yeah, this structure. Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

It almost seemed like really last minute or something. The way that we.

Did that, it adds like a It's like it's just like there's a real energy to it, like like almost like bursting out the gate, you know, like when you just yeah, like having that first verse be like kind of the intro you.

Know, yeah, it's a lot of tension because it you can tell that it's not finished or it's not resolved or something.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that was like arranging like in the studio.

Was that an omnichord song?

Yes, but I did.

I had the baseline first, that boom da da doo doo boom boom, I.

Like had that bassline.

That bassline came to me first, actually, so I think after I like got that down, then I formed the rest on the omnichord.

And how how did you work on the omnichord? I know there's like pre program stuff, but you don't have to do pre programs. I mean the drums are pre programmed I guess at least, right, but the chords you can do whatever.

What I was looking for was something so simple. I was like, all I want is a drum machine that I just select the sound and push play.

I don't want to edit it in any way.

Because in previous albums I would ask Cody and Nate to send me, Hey, can you just send me a drum a drum beat? And Cody actually made me these really helpful ones where I'd say, like Cody sent me punk drums and you would make a loop for me because it's easier for me to write a song on the bass. Playing at two drums is just like inspiring. It just like gives me ideas that I wouldn't have if it was just me and the bass and silence. Right, So for this process, I wanted access to chords that I could just like push a button and it plays a chord.

You know, I don't.

I felt so overflowing with musical ideas. I didn't feel like I had the time to learn how to play the chords on a guitar or something, or on a piano.

I have no idea how to play a piano.

I just wanted something that I could push a button and play a chord to a drum machine. And I didn't want to rely on anyone for help where normal am like employing Cody to like, please send me some drum machine, and I have to send him things to interpret, you know, like either singing guitar parts or like this kind of a sound. If you could come up with a part that's sort of similar to that, like this, you know it. Just finding the omnichord was just such a big help because I could be alone and be forming songs much quicker than relying on the boys to help interpret me. And so, yeah, the way I use it is I would find a drum beat. I mean it is silly. The like sounds on there are hilarious.

Yeah, the drums are fucking terrible.

They sound like trash.

It totally worked great for me though, you know, it's what I needed. It was means to an end. So you know, I would slow down. I'd get like, oh, a samba beat, and then slow it way down or speed it way up to where like, Okay, this feels like this feels like the rhythm and the intensity that I'm looking for for this song. And then I would set the sound of the instrument, you know, to pim know or harp or flute or you know whatever. There's a lot of silly sounds on there. And then you're just pushing the cords. And then you have a strum plate, which is supposed to be like strumming strings, but it's this like plate that you rub your fingers back and forth on.

Grill.

Yeah.

Actually it's like a really soft, very soft, smooth ribs, but it has really sharp corners because it's all made out of like plastic that got.

Glued on, so you can't go too far. But yeah, so it was really fun and and and physical, you know, like.

You're physically pushing all this stuff down, so it felt like satisfying. I mean, if I could design one on my own, it would be bigger, with a bigger strum plate and buttons that like really feel satisfying to squish down.

Yeah, you should try it. There's like a bunch of different models and like different I think like Suzuki and Yamaha and maybe like another company made different versions, but they recently made a reproduction of the like original one, so you can like buy the new one that's a reproduction of like the first model.

That's awesome. I feel like that must be in the air too, because yeah, yeah, Michelle and Deggioceello released an album called The Omnichord Real Book, and I guess she wrote a lot of the songs on there on the Omnichord too, So I was like, no.

This is yeah, it's like coming back for sure. There's like a lot of people using it.

It's pretty awesome. Yeah, you guys are kind of both pretty voracious music consumers, it appears to me. I don't know, if it's I think it's for your last album. You have a playlist on Spotify inspiration for a new record and has like incredible cuts on it. What was the first kinds of music that you both fell in love with?

Man, I love the songs that I can first remember, like really becoming fixated on listening over and over Sweet Dreams by Your Rhythmics, and enter Sandman by Metallica, and then nine Inch Nails down in It and the Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.

All nice, that's so cute, what a cute combo.

It's all like pretty like dark it is, damn.

And then like as you moved on, like how did your listening change?

One thing that me and Shannon both had it in common was that we both loved Primus, but it was like our favorite band when we were like in junior high or something. We were like Primisheads. I went like, yeah, really hard on like industrial stuff, like you know, like kind of deep stuff like Skinny Puppy and like Front two four two and had this kind of goth vibe and then got really into like kind of like skate punk pop punk stuff and then you know, like Pennywise, Operation Our Ivy.

Yeah, bad religion you miss grade or something like that. Yes, yeah, all that ship.

And Shannon was like a big misfit st still is. Yeah, missive said Danzig, so great.

I love like all your Spotify or yeah, umpeccable. We needed that.

Reminds you like, I feel like we need to update that or like sort of re curated. I don't know, because the way it organizes them on your profile is kind of weird. I don't really understand how it works. But some of those playlists are like really old.

You don't know how it works either, But don't delete them because they're so good. I'm not archival.

A few of those Joe made, of which, yeah, Joe made a few of them. He made one of the ones for your wedding. It's called wedding Tinkerings. Yes, and he made one that says like Tahoe.

He made Yeah, I forgot used our account. We all shared like one Spotify login.

Yeah. And then when we were doing a Patreon we would make playlists for every month and he would he would like work on them with me.

Can you guys share a playlist with me to put out to the audience for this episode?

Share Joe Jojo Yeah, Okay.

The significance of this playlist is that Joe would make mixtapes like the Real Mixtape for.

People, like like cassette tapes.

A cassette tape, and then it would come with like he would do a beautiful little drawing on the cover and then write out, you know, the songs, just like back in the day. And I cherished my mixtapes from Joe, and so when we were getting ready for like the funeral and celebration of life and stuff, I requested that everyone he'd made a tape for send their mixes, like just the playlist to a friend named Kelly, who compiled them and made a big Spotify just like of all of Joe music essentially, And I love this playlist is so good. I honestly listened to that a lot right after he died. That was like months of me just listening to that. So I'm sure some of that stuff formed its way into my songwriting as well without me realizing it.

Did you guys have any specific references for this album?

One thing I was like trying to channel was like, I want to make a playlist more about this, but this kind of late this crossover, this like kind of late R and B like pre disco era where there's like you get some kind of like psychedelic like fuzz guitar stuff and that's some kind of like disco R and B singing. One example was that song I think it's called Liar Liar called.

Lilaa Pencil File.

Yeah. I mean it's so weird and like such a genre mashup, is it?

Yeah, Oh, it's so good.

There's that.

There's this song, this late like Blue Christie song called Dancing in the Sand that's kind of this weird kind of like down tempo. This goes on with this like big chorus. Anyway, I was trying to, like I wanted to capture that weird genre mashup, which I think we did. I think on the Moon is in the wrong place in Big Wheel, like we kind of got close to that.

Definitely feels that way. Yeah.

A lot of the time what I do is when I'm working on a song, like ideas will come to me of things that I want to go back and listen to from other artists, or I want to like, like, oh, when I listen to Blossom Lady by Shocking Blue, it makes me feel this way and I want to feel that way when I play this song, so I'll have like little notes, Like right now, I'm looking at.

My song book.

Every time we do an album, I like get a notebook and it's just like filled with all my weird notes and my songs and track listing potentials.

And so.

I wrote down some things I was inspired by, and I wrote Zombies, Shocking Blues, Sir Doug Quintet, Paul McCartney, Rocking Horse, Jerry, Jeff Walker, Beach Boys.

And there's definitely like that these have wound their way into the songs for sure.

Or like I'm looking at Dolly's clock and I wrote down Irma Thomas breakw Way drums, so I guess I was listening to that at the time, or like on on Moon is in the wrong place. I don't think that this ended up coming through, but I wrote down Buzzcocks, July, break on Through, abrupt Yelling, Jim Morrison, Funny. I'm glad I wrote this stuff down. I don't know that I would have before.

That's really cool that you. Yeah, that's like a really cool journal to keep. That'd be great for the reissue in ten years.

Yeah, deluxy.

See, this is the kind of stuff that I would love to see from another artist. I love to look at. I'm also a painter. I love to see people's notebooks. I love to see their art, their like art desk set up. I love to see how people.

Notate their music.

Most of the time I can't relate to that because is we call it shanglish. But anyways, I love to see other people's processes.

Do you often ask other people?

I often ask to see people's like workspace and if they have like some kind of like notebook or sketches, But it's it can also be a really private thing, so I gotta read each situation. One of my favorite art exhibits I've ever seen was at Disneyland. They have a little gallery in there that they'll have various exhibits, and they had this one that was on the Tiki Room, and it was all the concept art for the Tiki Room. So it was all these artists like sketches, like all the various ways that they were like maybe the birds could look like this, or look like this, or look like this. Maybe we should have the inside of the like hut theater thing look like this.

I love seeing that.

Is that kind of inside scoop or it. I went to the Walt Disney Museum in the Presidio in San Francisco, and they have tons of concept art in there, but they also have the illustrator's desk, which it was one of my favorite things to see, just how the imagineers in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties generally set up their art table.

Yeah, thanks so much for talking about you guys' process and about the new album and all that's kind of been going on. It's been really great talking to you guys.

You too, Thank you so much.

Thank you, It's been really great.

A big thank you to Shannon Shawn Cody Blanchard for making such a beautiful record and talking through some of the painful moments that led to its creation. And as promised, be sure to check out the link in the episode description for a playlist the late Joe Haynes collected mixtapes. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash Broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Toliday. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.

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