Shannon Hawley is a songwriter, healer, and storyteller based in Point Pleasant, NJ. Her newest album, STARTHROWERS, is a memoir in song paying homage to women and caretakers doing the invisible, overlooked work of love.
With a clear voice and deep New Jersey roots, Shannon alternates between the anthemic and the understated, across themes of grief and praise, as well as our relationships to our history, the natural world, and each other.
What is your current music project about? And what was your creative process?
The album STARTHROWERS is a memoir in song paying homage to women and caretakers doing the invisible, often overlooked work of love which connects us to each other, to our history, and to the earth itself.
This album is 7 plus years in the making. I have been writing these songs on borrowed time while growing, feeding, and taking care of my two daughters. While moving from Brooklyn to Ithaca New York to NJ to Vermont to Los Angeles back to New Jersey (with a three-month pandemic hiatus in Costa Rica). I have been writing them as thank you letters to caretakers, women, and artists but also as prayers to my ancestors so that I might leave behind a legacy of ancestral healing for the next generation.
What is the story behind the title track?
When I read the powerful essay, “The Starthrower” by nature writer, Loren Eiseley, all the words I had been writing into songs seemed to make sense as one larger chorus.
Eiseley wrote about a human “Starthrower” who was throwing stranded dying starfish back into the ocean to save them from the death of drying on a cliff. When reading it, I thought of my sisters and me just after our dad died. I thought of my mother. The stranded starfish’s home had been washed out from under them too, from around them, by the tide. And that Starthrower was tossing them back into the ocean, back to their living home.
At first, the narrator who witnesses this assumes the Starthrower is taking part in a pointless task. There were so many dying starfish, and there would be so many tides. When the narrator approaches he essentially asks “Why do you do it? And how will it make a difference? There are so many of them.”, the Starthrower responds that it DOES matter. Holding the starfish in his hand, he tosses it and reminds us that “it matters to THIS one”. The narrator sees this and something changes for him. He recognizes the power of attention and care. He too begins to toss the dying sea stars back into the big living soup. He too becomes a thrower. And so it is the story of how we recognize our power in this world and what we can do with our love.
In all of our grieving, after my father died, there were people who stepped in to help my sisters and mom and I stay alive. They did it by being patient, they did it by standing by, they did it by listening, they did it by loving us.
Remembering that we are made up of the same stuff of both the starfish that we toss to save from a drying shoreline and the stars in the sky millions of miles from us. Sometimes we are saved, sometimes we are thrust into an unknown universe, and sometimes we throw the ones that need saving. That time of grieving, of healing, of in-between, indoctrinated us as Starthrowers, as ghost owners, as child growers. We were quietly being tossed back into the land of the living, again and again, and as many times as we needed, by our extended family, by friends, sometimes by each other and by the earth itself. Art and music have also cast me back to aliveness in my life and so I create as a way to give back.
When a wave of grief crashes that hard against young humans, it can both make you brace yourself for every single wave after that and also make you realize that once the wave breaks it becomes part of the whole ocean again, it is pulled back into the water. You have felt the pain of heartbreak and can not only survive the storms and tides of your life but maybe even have greater capacity in your heart for more waves, for more ocean.
There is something about humans who come together after the unfathomable, something dramatic that takes us out of the every day and places us in the sacredness of the now. My sisters are that for me. When we are together another type of energy swirls. I imagine it happens to all survivors of heartbreak and heartache. In a house, on land, in the water.
We are all, if we are lucky, at some point for each other, Starthrowers.
What are some of the other songs about?
Aunt Honey is for my great-aunt who dedicated much of her life to looking after my father after his mother had died very young. I sing of the grief they recognized in each other and how sometimes love comes from unexpected places but can help us heal.
Bones, Blood, Saltwater, and Song is for my mother who raised her 5 daughters after my father died at 42 years old and always said love was the most important thing and always kept singing.
The Night the Lights Came on in Holland reflects on my husband’s Grandmother and the miracle of having babies during WWII and the largest man-made famine Holland.
I have written essays for each of the songs on the album and love the idea of reading them (maybe at local bookstores on a cold and rainy afternoon) and then playing a stripped down version of the songs as an intimate way to experience this project and share human light and inspiration with one another.
Where did you record? Who was involved?
I had just moved back to my hometown of Point Pleasant, NJ and launched my second attempt at a crowd-funding Kickstarter project for the album (I had canceled my first Kickstarter project since I launched it 3 days before the pandemic shut everything down).
I had no producer and was thinking about working with good musician friends in Burlington, Vermont but the travel was going to be challenging.
Around that time I agreed to be a guest on my brother-in-law, former UFC fighter, Kurt Pellegrino’s podcast “Fighting for Laughs”. At that show, I met Hector Gundlach. We hit it off by talking about creativity and music. He was in a progressive Rock band for 7 years before releasing a unique blend of reggae, house, and electronic music as Nekter Gun. He had also just finished a program at Berkelee School of Music for songwriting and production and we were excited to work together on this album.
We recorded in his home studio. It took an entire year – mostly because we were doing it while my daughters were at school, in between bouts of COVID, and a lot of collaborating about the arrangements.
What fictional character do you wish was real?
My first thought was Falcor from the NeverEnding Story or the turtle, Bertrand, from Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel Thrust.
What is your favorite children’s story?
Definitely Frederich, the mouse poet who brings warmth to his family during the hibernation and scarcity of winter with his poetry. I also love the Velvteen Rabbit because of these quotes: ‘Everything That is Real Was Imagined First” and
“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” I like it because it reminds us that it takes a long time to become real and that no love is ever wasted.
What is the most useless talent you have?
Hahaha, that’s a tough one:) I think it’s probably that I’ve taken up rollerskating recently. I don’t skate fast and I wear a lot of silly-looking protective gear but as a practice to infuse some of these heavy and sometimes intense songs with joy – I would roller skate on this long one way street near the beach where I grew up. I would sing the songs loudly while roller skating, then sing them to the ocean (these songs belonged to her first) and then head to the studio with those ecstatic moments in my body and sing into the microphone imagining little threads of bittersweet love reaching ears who would hear the song just when they needed it.
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