…He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

-W. H. Auden

Life is unfair

Yet beautiful

I see it now

-Shannon Shaw

The Moon Is In The Wrong Place is a thanatopsis to love, loss and acceptance, as Shannon Shaw sublimates the tragic death in 2022 of her fiancé Joe Haener, turning her heart’s coal into gold.  With heartbreaking toe-tapping tear-jerkers (see: “Real Or Magic”, “So Lucky”, “Life Is Unfair” and “Oh So Close, Yet So Far”), Shannon herself is a living work of kintsukuroi, mending herself and her Clams where the light gets in, back into something brutally honest…yet still worthy of Dan Auerbach’s production at Easy Eye Sound in Nashville.  The Ronettes-embued track, “The Vow”, the only song written before the tragedy, was supposed to be sung by Shaw at her wedding, a mere 88 days after Haener’s passing, but instead opens the album, setting the tone for what’s to come: the opening up of a new perspective, and the pathway out of pathos.  The throbbing countdown of the track “Hourglass”, the second song of the set, perfectly encapsulates the chaotic and rage-filled time immediately after an untimely death of someone you really love—“…One grain of sand/Pouring through the vessel/Someone stole our time away/Left me with Dali’s clock/It’s ticking in the dark/Turning me inside out…”—the what-the-f*ck-just-happened-ness, where nothing makes any sense any more and the pit seems bottomless.  Of course, that first stage of grief is so messy, but, as is their métier, this Clams show was shockingly free of mess.  What could have been dark songs to be sung in the hopeless dark, songs of longing for this love or this person that you can’t ever have again…they weren’t.  It was shockingly clever and upbeat.  And even Shannon was shockingly upbeat, tossing flowers to the audience after their encore (obviously Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and the optimistic Can’t-Hurry-Love-riffed “Bean Fields”), joined by friends Noelle Fiore and Joel Robinow and her dog, Spanky-Joe.  Capping off the end of their tour at home in Oakland with family and friends in attendance at the historic Fox Theater, Shannon & The Clams are nothing if not resilient, raging against the hourglass of time and their little hearts of glass.