Circles Around The Sun

Circles Around the Sun began as an instrumental outfit assembled around guitarist Neal Casal to supply incidental music for the 2015 Fare Thee Well shows mounted by the surviving Grateful Dead members. That material echoed the Dead’s expansive, groove-oriented atmosphere. Once the concerts concluded, selections from the performances appeared as the 2015 release Interludes for the Dead. Strong audience reaction prompted the quartet to record the 2018 double album Let It Wander, which blended jazz-funk, fusion, and R&B. After issuing the Meets Joe Russo EP and completing a third album in 2019, Casal died by suicide. The remaining members kept touring with a series of guitarists before inviting John Lee Shannon to join full-time; he appears on the 2023 album Language. They later worked with harpist and vocalist Mikaela Davis, who served as frontperson on 2024’s After Sunrise.

Video director Justin Kreutzmann, son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill, contacted guitarist and composer Neal Casal—known for his work with Ryan Adams’ Cardinals, the Chris Robinson Brotherhood, and Phil Lesh & Friends—to produce five hours of music for biographical visuals screened during Fare Thee Well intermissions. Casal recruited keyboardist Adam MacDougall, another Robinson Brotherhood and Lesh & Friends alumnus, bassist Dan Horne of Beachwood Sparks and Jonathan Wilson, and drummer Mark Levy from the Congress. Their goal was to honor Grateful Dead music while channeling the band’s constant experimentation and ultimately forging an independent identity.

The musicians entered the studio with no prepared material, writing and tracking live over two days under engineer J.P. Hesser at Castaway 7 Studios; nothing was added afterward. The resulting pieces and jams accompanied the concerts, and the enthusiastic response led Rhino Records to issue a proper release. A two-disc distillation of the original five hours came out as Interludes for the Dead in late November 2015, while the full recordings appeared as a triple-disc set inside the Dead’s 19-disc Fare Thee Well box documenting every show. Rather than disband, the quartet performed a run of live dates and returned to Castaway 7 Studios in Ventura, California, for two weeks in early 2018. This time they captured seven instrumentals that departed from their debut, issuing the double-length Let It Wander in August; its range extended from jazz fusion on “The Impossible” to taut funk on “One for Chuck,” referencing Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

Following a brief touring hiatus, the group began a third album in mid-2019 with Grammy-winning producer Jim Scott at his Southern California facility. Most of the record finished before they delivered a well-received late-night performance at the Lockn Festival in August and completed an EP with Joe Russo on drums. On August 26, less than a week after Lockn, Casal died by suicide. Keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Dan Horne, and drummer Mark Levy, still reeling, spent several months weighing whether to continue.

After the October release of Meets Joe Russo, they chose to proceed and brought in Casal’s longtime collaborator Eric Krasno of Soulive as the first of several touring guitarists; others included Jared Mattson and Scott Metzger. In March 2020 they issued their self-titled third album, a seven-track set recorded the week before Casal’s death and representing his final studio work.

One of the rotating guitarists, New York-based John Lee Shannon, had released his own solo acoustic album In & Of on Tompkins Square in 2020. After a year of touring together, the band entered Horne’s Echo Park studio with harpist Mikaela Davis as guest and emerged with Language. Issued in April 2023 while Circles Around the Sun toured the United States, the record fused disco, funk, and soul-jazz within deep, atmospheric neo-psychedelia. Mikaela Davis’s own band opened those shows; afterward the group invited her to co-bill and perform on the North American support tour for their subsequent album After Sunrise, released on Kill Rock Stars.