golden shadow - music and video
GOLDEN SHADOW
Music by Jen Schaffer and the Shiners — jenschafferandtheshiners.ca
Video directed & designed by Vered Goldman — rosartstudio.com
Jen Schaffer and The Shiners are a soulful folk-rock band spanning Toronto, Montreal and the UK. Front woman Jen Schaffer - a former public defender in Appalachian Ohio - writes songs of love, struggle and injustice drawn from her own life. Shiner drummer, keyboardist and producer, Simon Law, is a three-time Grammy-winning songwriter (Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”) and an original member of that collective.
The song Golden Shadow, from the band’s new album The Paradox of Life Confounds (June 2026), draws on Jung’s concept of the “golden shadow” - the buried brightness in ourselves we struggle to reclaim. Schaffer wrote it after a dharma talk on the idea during an Ontario meditation retreat.
Director Vered Goldman’s video blends live footage with hand-drawn animation, opening with a paper cut-out of an antique carousel near her home in Florence, Italy that echoes the Ferris wheel from her cover art for the band’s new album. Goldman describes the film as capturing memory itself — paper cut-outs and illustrations that flicker between stillness and motion, presence and absence, “like a golden ray of sunlight… that cannot be possessed, only witnessed.”