Circles Around the Sun is an instrumental band initially 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. Following that project, guitarist Neal Casal, bassist Dan Horne, keyboardist Adam MacDougall, and drummer Mark Levy issued Interludes for the Dead from those gigs and toured. The positive response motivated them to release follow-up Let It Wander in 2018, a less structured, meld of jazz-funk, fusion, and R&B. After completing the Meets Joe Russo EP and a third album in 2019, Casal committed suicide. He left his bandmates a note telling them to continue. They issued the third album as Circles Around the Sun, and toured with a rotating cast of guitarists; they eventually asked New York's John Lee Shannon to join permanently. After playing shows across 2021 and 2022, they recorded the album Language at Horne's Echo Park studio. It was released in 2023.

Video director Justin Kreutzmann (son of GD drummer Bill) approached guitarist/composer Neal Casal (Ryan Adams' Cardinals, Chris Robinson Brotherhood, Phil Lesh Friends) about creating five hours of music to accompany his biographical visuals to be shown during the Fare Three Well concert intermissions. Casal enlisted keyboardist Adam MacDougall (a fellow member of the Robinson Brotherhood and Lesh's Friends bands), bassist Dan Horne (Beachwood Sparks, Jonathan Wilson), and drummer Mark Levy (the Congress). Casal explained that "...the idea was to not only show reverence for the past but to ultimately move it forward," adding "If there's anything to be learned from the Grateful Dead, it is to dissolve your boundaries, push your limits, and discover your own voice in this world."

To that end, this new band entered the studio without having prepared any material. They composed on the spot and recorded live for two days with engineer J.P. Hesser. They kept the process pure by not adding anything during post-production. While most involved with the project assumed these sessions would just end up as background music that concertgoers would pay little attention to, they were wrong. The response by attendees was so positive that Rhino Records decided to issue a proper release. A two-disc set culled from the original five hours of music was released independently as Interludes for the Dead in late November 2015. The complete recordings were made available as a triple-disc set included with the Dead's mammoth 19-disc (audio and video) box set that documents the complete run of shows and is titled, appropriately, Fare Thee Well. In the aftermath of this release, rather than splitting and going their own ways, the quartet played a series of shows that were well-attended and received, and response to the album was also positive. They returned to Castaway 7 Studios in Ventura, California in early 2018 for two weeks, this time with no set goal or structure in mind. They recorded seven instrumentals that diverged sharply from the content on their debut offering, and released it as the double-length album Let It Wander in August with music that ranged in scope from jazz fusion ("The Impossible") to wrangling funk ("One for Chuck," as in Public Enemy's Chuck D).

After a tour, the band took a short break; during the summer of 2019, they began working on a third album with Grammy-winning producer Jim Scott at his Southern California studio. With most of the album completed, they turned in a crowd-pleasing late-night set at the Lockn Festival in August, and also finished an EP with Joe Russo on drums. On August 26, less than a week after their performance at Lockn, Casal committed suicide. In the aftermath, keyboardist Adam MacDougall, bassist Dan Horne, and drummer Mark Levy, all in a state of shock, grew closer than ever before and spent a couple of months deciding whether to continue as a band.

After committing to the October 18 release of Meets Joe Russo, they made a collective decision (along with Scott) to issue their third album. Circles Around the Sun enlisted Casal's longtime friend and collaborator Eric Krasno (Soulive) as the first of several rotating guitarists to fill the chair on the road, others included Jared Mattson and Scott Metzger. In March 2020, the band issued its third album. Finished the week before Casal's death, the seven-track set represented his final studio sessions.

On tour, one of their rotating guitarists was New York-based, John Lee Shannon, a singer, songwriter and recording artist in his own right. Shannon released two acclaimed -- though now obscure and collectible -- albums for ObliqSound: 2008's American Mystic and 2011's Songs of the Desert River. Time Was a Lie appeared on Creek Valley in 2012 and the solo acoustic In Of on Tompkins Square in 2020. The band spent a year touring with Shannon before entering Horne's Echo Park studio. They emerged with Language. Its material oscillated across hybrid strains of disco, funk, soul-jazz, and neo-psychedelic rock. Circles Around the Sun also enlisted harpist Mikaela Davis as a contributor. Language was issued in the spring of 2023. ~ Thom Jurek, Rovi