Shane Renfro of RF Shannon thought he saw a red swan, but it was a trick of the light. He was camping in Palmetto State Park, only 10 miles away from the parcel of land he owns near Lockhart, Texas. He’d somehow never been there before, didn’t realize there was such a swampy, tropical area tucked away so close to home. There’s no such thing as a red swan, but like so many other images in RF Shannon’s music the image stands as a powerful totem on its own.

While Shane Renfro looks like an anagram of RF Shannon, it’s not quite. Shane saw the initials of his grandfather written on envelopes when he was young and always liked the sound of it and how similar it felt to his own name. When it came time to choose a band name, Shane felt that these initials held significance toward building a mythology of his own.

RF Shannon has roots in Texas. Raised in the small East Texas town of Grapeland, Renfro grew up listening to Jerry Jeff Walker’s Viva Terlingua on the pinewood backroads with his father and brother, while Motown music filled the house on lazy weekends. His love for multiple genres is evident in that he never seems to gravitate towards any one in particular. Having backed other songwriters on multiple instruments in Tyler, Nashville, and Austin, it wasn’t until he formed a duo with his brother Jeff Renfro on drums that he’d sing for the first time. With Shane on guitar they’d add bass player Austin Burge and Luke Dawson on pedal steel, experimenting with psych, soul, desert rock, folk, Americana, and all genres in between. 

Renfro spent the next few years honing his craft, and admits that his first release, an EP entitled Hunting Songs, was quite literally the act of hunting for songs, and for a style that would define RF Shannon’s sound. By the time their first album Jaguar Palace was released in 2017, the band had established a unique mood to their music, due in part to their insistence on performing live shows on small islands and in limestone caverns. This early era of sprawling, meandering soundscapes, and guttural intimate vocals would soon evolve into a more fine-tuned and tucked in approach to songwriting, though no less moody.

Rain On Dust, the third RF Shannon album and first for Keeled Scales, was released in 2019. The band had tracked their previous album Trickster Blues in Lockhart in only three days and were happy with the wabisabi approach, but it was obvious to Shane that the next album wouldn’t come as easily. By that time Shane was living in Los Angeles and yearning for community and the connections he’d felt with other artists in Texas. He was driving back and forth to Texas a lot and obsessing over the heartwrenching prose in Martín Prechtel’s book The Smell of Rain On Dust. Songs were lingering in his head during these trips, and they would eventually be polished while house-sitting for Molly Burch in Austin, who the band would later tour with that August.

Just before the release of Rain On Dust, Renfro returned to Lockhart, Texas. On his drive home, and thinking of Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway,” he began writing “Cedar Perfume,” a song about leaving L.A. and all that he was leaving behind. It would end up being the start of a new album. An early version of the song appeared on a benefit compilation in 2020 that supported native people fighting pipelines in south Texas (curated by Jordan Moser and including Big Thief and Sharon Van Etten). 

A canceled trip to Ireland in 2020 led to Renfro writing “Dublin, Texas,” in which he tapped Rebecca Patek (living in nearby Bastrop, Texas) to play fiddle on. That song was released in 2021 with a music video directed by Jordan Moser and longtime visual collaborator Daniel Hill.

Both songs would end up being included on Red Swan in Palmetto, offering direction for Renfro who was recording alone and with ProTools for the first time. He used Patek’s fiddle playing to weave together themes on the album, but he very quickly fell under the weight of disorganized files, losing sessions. He called in help from Todd Hannigan, who he tracked new sessions with, along with Chazz Bessette in Lockhart. He recorded a session with Dan Duszynski in Dripping Springs. 

But it wasn’t until Renfro met Rob Barbato during an Esther Rose show at Sam’s Town Point that the album would find its full momentum and expression. Barbato helped clarify all the sessions Renfro had already recorded. They kept the parts that worked in service of the songs and overdubbed fresh ideas when inspired to. “Cedar Perfume” and “Raindance #11” were re-tracked from scratch, with Barbato on drums and bass. 

Heathen Nights, Midnight Jewelry, Abalone. These images and cipher-like lyrics are the next chapter in RF Shannon’s hazy mythology, but behind them all is a whole community of Texas artists, like stars reflecting in a swamp, the names we see scrawled on an envelope, a trick of light that allows something impossible to exist.