Circles Around The Sun

Circles Around the Sun is a contemporary instrumental rock band that formed with the specific purpose of creating intermission music for Fare Thee Well, a series of reunion concerts played by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead during their 2015 tour. Those shows celebrated the band's 50th anniversary and served as their official send-off, while Circles Around the Sun was designed to reflect the Dead's spacy and grooving overall feel. After the tour, the group issued a self-titled album from the Fare Thee Well gigs and supported it with their own road trip. The response was so positive that they remained a going concern and released Let It Wander in 2018, which was less influenced by the Dead and more freeform, delivering on the roots influence of jazz-funk, soul, and fusion. The band underwent a fundamental transition in 2019.

Circles Around the Sun’s third full-length studio album, a self-titled, seven track collection, marks the final recordings of founding member and guitarist Neal Casal. The sessions were tracked at legendary recording engineer Jim Scott’s Southern California studio just one week prior to Casal tragically taking his own life.

After Sunrise, the new collaboration from Circles Around The Sun and Mikaela Davis reunites the disco cosmonauts and acclaimed harpist for further explorations of the synergy first showcased on the title track of CATS’ 2023 album, Language.Comprised of two new original compositions, ‘Gloaming Way’ and ‘Moonbow’, and an inspired interpretation of Brazilian legend Sérgio Mendes’ ‘After Sunrise,’ the album features the first appearance of vocals on a Circles Around The Sun recording, sung by Davis.

Those lucky enough to score a "miracle" ticket to the Fare Thee Well concerts this summer were treated to some potent psychedelic jams during the shows' intermissions. The mysterious group behind those freewheeling tunes was Circles Around the Sun, a band convened by guitarist Neal Casal specifically for the project.The songs were composed and recorded during a two-day jam session. The results were so captivating, and the audience response so overwhelmingly positive, Rhino decided to give the music a proper release as a 2CD apart from the complete versions of Fare Thee Well.

Los Angeles-based instrumental supergroup Circles Around the Sun returns with the release of Language, their fourth studio album. The group, known for their genre-bending skills, pays tribute to their origins while introducing their first body of work with now full-time guitarist John Lee Shannon. The album sequence will take fans on a psychedelic journey to a place of refuge, celebration, and peace, reflective of the band's own journey.

Circles Around The Sun explore new horizons on the band’s upcoming double album, LET IT WANDER. It’s the first new music from the quartet since their acclaimed 2015 debut, Interludes For The Dead.

Vinyl LP pressing. 2020 release, the third album from the Los Angeles-based instrumental supergroup. Recorded by legendary engineer Jim Scott (Wilco, Rolling Stones, Tom Petty) at his studio in Valencia, CA, this new collection began with… a drum machine. The Sequential Circuits Drumtraks from 1983, to be specific. The Circles band members-guitarist Neal Casal (Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Ryan Adams), bassist Dan Horne (Cass McCombs, Jonathan Wilson), keyboardist Adam MacDougall (Black Crowes) and drummer Mark Levy-were searching for a sound, something more upbeat than previous releases. Cue the Drumtraks. The seven-track collection marks a stylistic shift from their previous LPs. It's an evolution that sees the band embracing a sleeker, shinier, even dancier version of themselves - a cosmic disco of the body and the soul, still anchored in the groove, but ascending to the stars.

LET IT WANDER signals a new beginning for the band as they move beyond their original musical mandate of evoking the spirit of the Dead and fully embrace their own personality. “More than anything, what you hear on this album is a band growing into its own sound,” Casal says. The songs on LET IT WANDER are focused and filled with imaginative musical turns. Horne and Levy form a veritable groove machine that knows intuitively when to tighten up and when to stretch out. They expand and collapse the rhythmic pocket around Casal and MacDougall, who pass melodies back and forth in an elaborate game of musical tag as they take turns adding color and shade from a seemingly endless kaleidoscope of cosmic sounds.