Circles Around The Sun, the psychedelic instrumental quartet that rose from the Fare Thee Well Celebration of the Grateful Dead in 2015, continues to evolve and grow.
The project’s original founder, guitarist Neal Casal, tragically ended his life in August 2019. A non-profit has emerged bearing his name to puts instruments in students’ hands and raise money for mental health organizations that help musicians in need (find out more here).
The band has thankfully persevered and is releasing its fourth album this spring, Language, the first with guitarist John Lee Shannon, who has been settling in with the band the last few years. They have a number of festival appearances planned starting with the Skulls & Roses Festival April 19-23. Information about their shows can be found here.
Drummer Mark Levy sat down with Jam in the Stream before the band’s March 15 show at the Turf Club in St. Paul while the band was touring the Midwest. He discussed a number of topics, including the way he was originally drafted to work on the project, the late night after-party he was a part of that had a surprise appearance from Billy Strings in Denver this past February, and the direction in which the band has moved musically, among other topics.
Circles Around The Sun wasn’t even originally a band, their job simply to record hours of music that would play during the setbreaks of that 50-year celebration in Santa Clara, Calif., and Chicago.
But the reception to the magic they created was bound to develop into something bigger.
Casal, guitarist for the Chris Robinson Brotherhood at the time, initially involved bandmate Adam MacDougall. The two already had developed an incredible musical bond. Levy and bassist Dan Horne also brought a lot of experience and chops to the mission.
I asked Levy how he was drafted into the project.
MacDougall recommended him to Casal, who called him, he said. He was flown out to Los Angeles a couple of weeks later and he met Horne and the recording began in Ventura, Calif.
“I had known Adam and Neal and played with Adam a little bit but I’d seen them both play a lot, and they had seen me play a lot,” said Levy.
I asked about the importance of the connection that Casal and MacDougall brought to what seemed like a daunting assignment to record a high volume of intrumental music that was worthy of the occasion, and how Horne and himself were able to fit into the equation so naturally.
"It definitely is highly improvisational in nature trying to fill that assignment,” he said. "You said daunting, and I think when you’re facing down a deadline and you have to do a certain amount of work, you kind of just do the work, you know. ... Neal used the term 'seed energy,' so it made it easier for me personally to just sit there in that little studio, we’re all just in that little room, and I’m just imagining what it would feel like to be on a set break at a Dead show and standing with 100,000 people and it’s that supportive role that in this band Dan and I (have).”
They recorded hours of music and Levy said he didn’t even hear it until the Santa Clara weekend, while he was at his home bar, the Shakedown Bar in Vail, Colo., where the webcast was airing.
He noticed it right before his own gig started.
"I was like, 'I think this is us!' and then I was like, 'This is definitely us!' And I was stoked. I was definitely stoked on the way it sounded. And I have to say I enjoyed seeing some of the chatter online the following weekend. … I actually got to go to my first Grateful Dead show or Dead show at all in Chicago."
Levy is humble, and what he said next really strikes at the way he’s tried to serve the music as the beat keeper.
"I like to think about my playing as laying down like a carpet,” he said. “I’ve used this analogy before. It’s not one that I created. It came from a teacher of mine (former New England Conservatory of Music instructor Bob Moses). He said you should lay down a nice carpet so everybody can dance. And as a drummer, that’s just being very supportive and keeping the tempo really consistent.
“So that, behind what Neal and Adam were doing, obviously those guys were able to dance on the carpet, you know. So that’s still the thing today. And John is also very much part of the music. Adam and John are developing their language. It just takes time.”
I wondered how much the band has been playing the original Interludes for the Dead material; Though I personally love all the releases the band has put out, the original release holds a dear place in my heart.
"Every set will have at least one or two songs from the first album, and we’re talking about trying to dig into some rarer cuts,” he said. "It’s a matter of time more than anything else. When you’re on the road, you’re running, so you can’t really have like a rehearsal, you know?”
The band, that night in St. Paul did play “Hallucinate a Solution,” a beautiful song that went longer than 20 minutes in the studio and has deep potential when it's played live.
Levy talked about the effects long instrumental journeys can have on listeners’ minds and souls.
"It’s more like a slow burn than a popping explosion every phrase, you know, or every song,” Levy said. “The songs are all between 10 and 20 minutes long. I’m a firm believer in the power that that has on our brains. Just being under the influence of a steady rhythm for an extended period of time like that is proven to open up the serotonin and all this beautiful heart-opening stuff. And when you’re around people it’s intoxicating, you know? To me that’s the real magic potential of music. So I like that we get to play with that and dabble in it.”
I asked Levy about the February late-night after party show at Knew Conscious in Denver.
The bill, to begin with, was pretty cool, with Terrapin Family Band guitarist Ross James, Leftover Salmon banjoist Andy Thorn, bassist Garrett Sayers of The Motet and Levy.
Then Billy Strings, and several of his bandmates, showed up unannounced at the intimate venue to play.
It had been billed as a Billy Strings after party, as the generational jamgrass talent was playing a big show at 1st Bank Center in Broomfield, Colo., that night.
Was he aware that the Strings crew would be coming in hot?
“I didn’t know until that night,” he said. "Andy mentioned that he might be coming down. It’s such a weird gig. It starts at 1 a.m. and goes until like 4 or something.”
Because the venue doesn’t technically sell alcohol, it is allowed to be open later, he said.
On the morning of this interview, Levy said he happened to run into Billy Strings’ banjoist Billy Failing at the airport.
"We were on the same train from security to the terminals,” he said. "He sat in too that night, and he was like, “See ya around,” or something. That’s what he said today, too.”
A few years back, Strings and Circles Around The Sun recorded a heartfelt cover of “All the Luck in the World,” part of a compilation of collaborations recorded as a tribute to Casal.
“That was a really cool day in the studio, and watching Billy digest that music and then sing it in one take, and play it in one take, and you know that solo we play live,” he said. “There’s some cool interactions. Yeah, it definitely was a nice tribute.”
Levy, himself a very nice guy, said the same of Strings; He’s also a big fan.
“He’s a fucking badass,” he said. “He is a bad ass. He’s so nice, so cool to be around. He’s just a nice person, a normal dude, funny and chill. Everybody he’s around is the same way, too, so it’s just like a vibe. I appreciate him a lot."
Circles Around The Sun has continued to try and stretch its sound into new directions. Photo by Javier Serna
Circles Around The Sun has continued to stretch their signature disco dance funk sound into new areas. I wondered about the influences, including the Dead, and beyond, how the band approaches writing albums now, beyond its initial task for Fare Thee Well.
“I think if there’s a Grateful Dead vibe in the music, it’s coming through our lens and the influence of that music,” he said. “But you know, more than anything we’re gravitating at least recently into a soundscape like Pink Floyd or some of the more you know, I don’t know, there’s always been a P-Funk influence and other stuff."
Levy felt uncomfortable expounding further for the band on its direction, but he offered more clarity on the way musical influences guide bands in different directions, especially an instrumental band.
“I was going to say, the influence of any particular band is it’s not a straight shot because we have that big difference without the lyrical content,” he said. "And you’ll notice I keep saying tunes, not songs, because we don’t have lyrics, and you know, you need lyrics to make a song. … It’s just a different animal. We’re occupying a weird little slice of the music world.”
Indeed, for a band that didn’t start out as a band, but more of a project, and easily could have never officially formed.
“I remember Neal saying in the studio on the second day when we were just listening to something, eating a meal on a break or something, he was like, ‘Yo, guys, I just want you to know if anything happens with this music, we’re just going to keep it all even and that’s how we’re going to do this. And if we get to play live gigs or whatever,’” Levy said. "I think in any musician’s head, it’s when you do some work, you hope that it will take on some… it’ll do a thing, it’ll go out there and do some magic. Obviously we had an unbelievable opportunity to create the music for Fare the Well set break. Beyond that it’s just music, we’re just making new original music."
Levy, and Jam in the Stream editor Javier Serna after the March 15 Turf Club show.