Circles Around the Sun (aka CATS) are back with a new album, Let It Wander. The instrumental, heavily improvisational quartet took the Grateful Dead community by surprise with their soundtrack for the Fare Thee Well performance, and the outpouring of love for the band led to live performances and an album release.
Guitarist Neal Casal took some time out of his grueling tour schedule to answer a few brief questions about the new album, the challenges of instrumental music, and what contributed to the unexpected love for the music of CATS.
The origins of CATS are well known by now to those in the scene. Casal explained the impetus for the project and what, in his opinion, attracted so many people to it: “You know, we did the first album for the Fare Thee Well shows. Justin Kreutzmann [son of Bill Kreutzmann] came to us and said he needed five hours of music, which is a crazy amount of minutes to put together.
The spirit of the Grateful Dead community and the way the music embodied it, it brought everything together. I’ve played with Phil Lesh before and I knew what sound to look for and it really resonated. People really love that music and we were just happy to be part of that experience.”
As a result of the overwhelming popularity of their debut, Casal and co. decided to start touring and make another record. Using the tried-and-true method of not fixing something that isn’t broken, Casal described the process of making Let It Wander:
“It was recorded at the same studio, with the same musicians, and mostly the same approach. We did a little bit of overdubbing on this album, whereas the first one [Interludes For the Dead], that was all totally live. I guess one difference would be that we didn’t make this music for any specific event, like we did with for Fare Thee Well shows and so we didn’t have that guiding us. So it’s a little different in that aspect, but otherwise it was a very similar process.”
One of the most appealing aspects about CATS to Deadheads is the way the music basically plays like an extended Grateful Dead jam. The long, drawn-out, and totally instrumental music is enthralling, all-encompassing, and wide-ranging.
Casal described the differences between instrumental music vs. music with vocals, saying: “It’s definitely challenging to write instrumental music that is interesting and engaging and keeps the audience into it for six or seven minutes, but it’s also challenging to write a good solid vocal melody and good lyrics, especially year after year. This is my first instrumental band, and luckily we just have such great chemistry that it works pretty well, but really there are challenges to just writing good music in general.”
Casal had a little more to say about how the Fare Thee Well circumstances pushed CATS out of their comfort zones and produced some really creative music: “You know for the first album, we had all these songs that were just really, really long, to make up that five hours’ worth of material. If Justin had said he needed 45 minutes of material, we would’ve written a bunch of four or five-minute songs, and they may not have branched out the way they did. But being forced into putting together enough music for five hours really led us into that exploration and from there it really jumped off.” That exploration is a key component of Grateful Dead music and a big part of why Deadheads fell so in love with CATS.
Circles Around the Sun perform with Greensky Bluegrass at The Beacon Theatre in New York City on January 12.
