Circles Around the Sun is an instrumental band, initially spearheaded by guitarist Neal Casal, that formed to create incidental music for 2015's Fare Thee Well concerts by surviving members of the Grateful Dead. The character of that music reflected the Dead's spacy, grooving feel. After the concerts, the group issued excerpts from the shows as Interludes for the Dead. The positive response motivated them to release a 2018 follow-up, Let It Wander, a flowing meld of jazz-funk, fusion, and R&B. After completing the Meets Joe Russo EP and a third album in 2019, Casal died by suicide. The band continued on and toured with a rotating cast of guitarists; they eventually asked John Lee Shannon to join permanently, and he played on 2023's Language.