shannon and the clams

“When you write a song that’s really close to you or really emotional, and then you play it a bunch of times and work on it, by the time you get to recording it, I feel like it’s not as heavy anymore,” guitarist Cody Blanchard of Shannon & the Clams tells SPIN in a video call. “It’s traveled from this crystal of painful…whatever’s going on,” Blanchard continues, “Then it’s been massaged into the craft of making the song. It becomes a little bit abstracted.”  At this point, a smiling Shannon Shaw, lead singer of the Oakland retro garage rock band, interjects from the other side of the screen, adding, “I love that metaphor.” I’d just asked them about their sixth album, Year of The Spider — trying to figure out how they transmuted its weighty themes into such buoyant tracks. “By the ...