Circles Around the Sun Release Self-Titled Third Album

by Kevin Johnson Saturday, March 14th, 2020

The world lost a musical genius when guitarist Neal Casal tragically took his own life late last year. It came one week after recording a new album with his band, Circles Around the Sun, and in a note left by Casal, he asked that the band continue on and the album be completed. The band has honored his wish, and now their self-titled third studio album is available.

Keyboardist Adam MacDougall, drummer Mark Levy, and bassist Dan Horne have continued performing, but are not going to have a permanent guitarist for the foreseeable future. “We love this music. The three of us—Dan, Mark, and myself—we really love it and really don’t want to stop playing it,” says MacDougall. “I don’t want our decision to come off in any other way than based on the fact we really, really love this band so much. We would always sit around and talk about the dream: the feeling of what it was like to be a teenager and start your own band. It’s your band, with everyone pulling their own weight, doing their part. This band felt like being in high school again.”

The album’s seven songs feature extended jams and exploratory textures with psychedelic tinges. That’s part of the band’s DNA, as it began when Casal was asked to create set break music for the Grateful Dead’s “Fare Thee Well” 50th anniversary shows in 2015. Horne’s tone recalls the muscular qualities of bass heroes from the ’60s, namely Phil Lesh and Jack Casady.

Circles Around the Sun just released an accompanying music video for “Leaving (Rogue Lemon),” which Horne explained. “‘Leaving (Rogue Lemon)’ is a story about a lemon that fell too far from the tree. It realized there was more to life than just being squeezed,” he writes. “It was tired of just making things sour, so it created its own path. But then after many wild adventures and tribulations it began to think, ‘Am I even a lemon? Was that tree even the tree from which I was grown? Maybe I was just dropped from the sky by a bird and fell through that lemon tree onto the ground, and that’s why I rolled so much farther than the others?’ The Rogue Lemon asks us to question if the cycle of life is really a cycle or is it a spiral?”