Deadheads awaken. Perk up your ears. Sonos Radio has joined forces with GRAMMY Award-winning filmmaker, producer and manager Emmett Malloy to release all ten episodes of America's Dead. With Malloy as its host and spiritual guide, the limited-run podcast is an impressionistic and improvisational journey to understand the Grateful Dead's enduring effect on the country, and why now - over five decades after sparking the counterculture movement - the band is more alive than ever.
Through fascinating stories and heady conversations with multiple generations and genres of musicians, a religious scholar and mushroom scientist, artists and streetwear designers, original band and business members, the founder of a sobriety group and others whose lives have been altered by the Grateful Dead, the series explores how the band of misfits have continued to change American music, culture and consciousness forever.
Listen to America's Dead, available now on Sonos Radio in the Sonos app, the Sonos Radio website, and on all major podcast platforms:
"This is a podcast about the Grateful Dead – but even more than that, it's about the community that made the Dead who they are. A truly American experiment," says Emmett Malloy, who has been a diehard Deadhead for nearly 40 years, and credits the band as one of the first artistic inspirations in a career that has seen him earn the GRAMMY for Best Music Film with The Big Easy Express, create documentaries such as The White Stripes in Under Great White Northern Lights and Netflix's Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, manage Jack Johnson and co-found Brushfire Records, and direct music videos for The War on Drugs, Blink-182, Metallica and more.
Through the progression of America's Dead, the series will also reveal the ultimate power that music has to transform identity and create community, unpacking what the Grateful Dead can tell us about us. Episodes are structured similar to a perfectly-curated set list, where listeners can experience the show in its seamless entirety, or just one jam at a time.
In the series premiere, Vampire Weekend frontman and unlikely Grateful Dead evangelist Ezra Koenig defends the wisdom of "hippie psychedelic nonsense," discusses what has inspired him most as a songwriter, and why he thinks Kurt Cobain would too be a Deadhead if he were alive today. During the next episode, Dr. Varun Soni - Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California - argues that the Dead are actually a religion, and talks with a student whose encounter with the band's music has guided both her gender transition and spiritual growth. Throughout the rest of America's Dead, listeners will also hear unbelievable tales from the Grateful Dead's 1969-1974 tour manager Sam Cutler, plus a conversation between Margo Price and longstanding Dead member Bob Weir via Price's Sonos Radio podcast Runaway Horses, and insight from the world's most famous mycologist, Paul Stamets, on how the Dead made mushrooms mainstream.
The second half of the show features Mac DeMarco and members of Animal Collective on how bands today draw inspiration from the Grateful Dead, as well as six-time GRAMMY-winner Lila Downs on her days traveling with the Dead and selling jewelry on Shakedown Street. Artist ESPO and LA streetwear label Online Ceramics discuss the visual language and staying power of iconography like dancing bears and the Steal Your Face logo, jazz legend Branford Marsalis reflects on the unforgettable audience he witnessed when playing an iconic series of Dead shows in the 1990s, and for the final installment of the series, Grateful Don, founder of the sobriety group Wharf Rats, will tell his story. Find the full list of episodes below.
America's Dead - Episode List
1. Ezra Koenig, in Defense of the Dead
2. The Dead are Channeling God, with Dr. Varun Soni and Sage
3. The Strange Hippie Default Mechanism, with Sam Cutler
4. Margo Price and Bob Weir in Conversation
5. Paul Stamets Says Eat Your Mushrooms
6. Mac DeMarco and Animal Collective are Channeling the Dead
7. How the Dead Changed Lila Downs' Life
8. The Creation of a Visual Language, with ESPO and Online Ceramics
9. Branford Marsalis Believes in Deadheads
10. Finding Sobriety Through the Dead, with Grateful Don
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| Emmett Malloy by Kizzy O'Neal |
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