In 2004, armed with a music degree from Bemidji State, Shannon Murray enrolled in grad school to hone her skills on the clarinet. Within a year, she was musically lost and personally unhappy. A heart-to-heart dialogue with one of her teachers changed the direction of her life.

“I was asked who I was, and why was I taking these classes,” Murray recalled. “The professor said I didn’t have to follow this path, so I made a decisive break from classical music.”  

She packed away the clarinet, grabbed a guitar, took her life savings of $30 and headed west in search of her musical self. In the past decade, she has overcome obstacles, poverty, broken bones and loneliness to find her style, family support and personal satisfaction.

Murray refers to her music as folk-punk, which allows her to tell a story using music as the medium.  She plays with unabashed energy, usually breaking a guitar string or two on stage, and has found her voice in the “Riot Grrrl” genre of feminism and social justice. A single mom living in Bemidji with two adopted children, she performs at schools, libraries, basements and concert halls.

The culmination of Murray’s search so far is a seventh album, due out this summer. Titled “Collecting Anchors,” it relays experiences from numerous journeys down the Mississippi as well as other musical explorations. “It is a metaphor for the trauma as well as the positive things in my life,” she said. “Anchors can be hard things that hold you down, but they can also be stable influences that held me in place.”

Murray plans on continually trying out both kinds of anchors as she refines her music and lives her life.