Photo by Kizzy O’Neal
Today, Sonos Radio and GRAMMY Award-winning filmmaker, producer and manager Emmet Malloy have unleashed all 10 episodes of America’s Dead. With Malloy as a narrator, host and guide, the limited-run podcast delves into the Grateful Dead’s enduring effect on the country and why now, 50 years after the counterculture movement, the Grateful Dead are still so alive, if not more alive than ever, and most eminently “what can the Dead tell us about us?”
Over the 10 episodes, Malloy ponders the iconic band and their music through storytelling and conversations with generations of musicians, like Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Mac DeMarco, Animal Collective, Lila Downs & Branford Marsalis, mushroom scientist Paul Stamets, contemporary Artist ESPO, streetwear Label Online Ceramics, tour Manager Sam Cutler, religious scholar Dr. Varun Soni, and Bob Weir in Conversation with Margo Price via Price’s Sonos Radio podcast Runaway Horses.
“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,” said Malloy in a press release. The episodes average at just around 20 minutes each, but each is flush with insight and contemplations.
In the premiere, Malloy and Koenig explore the validity and wisdom of “hippie psychedelic nonsense,” discuss what has inspired him most as a songwriter, and why he thinks Kurt Cobain would too be a Deadhead if he were alive today. In the next episode, Dr. Varun Soni – Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California – shares that the Grateful Dead are actually a religion, the podcast continues like a mindfully curated playlist of conversation,
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