America's Dead Sonos

Five decades after sparking the counterculture movement, the Grateful Dead are more alive than ever, and filmmaker Emmett Malloy wants to find out how. In this limited-run series from Sonos, join Emmett as he unpacks how a band of misfits changed American music, culture and consciousness forever, as told through the eyes of Ezra Koenig (Vampire Weekend), Animal Collective, mycologist Paul Stamets, Lila Downs, Margo Price and many more. What can the Grateful Dead tell us... about us?

Ezra Koenig is an unlikely evangelist for the Grateful Dead, and that’s exactly why we brought him on the show. In this first episode of America’s Dead, hear the Vampire Weekend frontman defend the wisdom of “hippie psychedelic nonsense” and reveal what has inspired him most as a songwriter. Plus in this episode, Koenig imagines that if Kurt Cobain were alive today, he too would be a Deadhead.

“The Grateful Dead saved me,” says Dr. Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life at the University of Southern California. And he’s not alone. In this episode, Dr. Soni argues that the Dead are actually a religion, and we meet Sage, a student of Dr. Soni, whose encounter with the Dead’s music at age 21 has helped guide both her gender transition and spiritual growth.

“The Grateful Dead viewed the very idea of planning as being some kind of fascist concept” says Sam Culter, the Dead’s tour manager from 1969 to 1974. Cutler is the guy who finally turned the Dead into a business, but it was an uphill battle the whole way. “The business model was made essentially by a kind of strange hippie default mechanism that worked in mysterious ways.” In this episode, stories from inside the strange hippie default mechanism. Emmett sits down with Sam Cutler and the stories get… pretty unbelievable.

Margo Price is a true force in country music. Political, opinionated, an incredible creative talent. Her latest project is a new podcast from Sonos called Runaway Horses. Margo just released an amazing interview with the Dead’s Bob Weir, and in this special feed drop, we’re passing the reins to Margo to hear her interview in full.

It all began with a bag of mushrooms… and a bolt of lightning. Today, Paul Stamets is the world’s most famous mycologist (mushroom scientist) but we begin by going back to the fateful day when young Paul, loaded up on psilocybin, climbed a tree in the middle of a thunderstorm. In this episode, Paul’s story is our gateway to learning about the long strange history of psychedelics in America, and how the Dead brought mushrooms mainstream.