Collaboration & Community Coalesce At Park City Song Summit

While attending the Park City Song Summit for the first time, it was immediately apparent that the purpose of the event, held for the fifth year in Park City, Utah, was to celebrate the value of going to see live music, while simultaneously checking in on the mental and physical well-being of the people whose lives are dedicated to putting shows on for adoring fans.

Mornings began with yoga classes, guided meditations and hikes, sound baths and other wellness exercises. Days were filled with insightful Song Summit Labs, with panels tackling a wide range of topics from sobriety and mindfulness for musicians, the legacy of the Grateful Dead, culinary and music industry overlap, the impact of change-driven female entrepreneurs, copyright evolution and other issues facing the current music industry landscape.

When not taking in a lab at the library, the Songwriters Porch stage outside provided intimate performances adjacent to a large open field park.

Evenings and nights offered an array of top-notch performances by the likes of Goose, Greensky Bluegrass, Dawes, Marcus King, Duane Betts, The Terrapin Family Band, LP Giobbi, Cimafunk and many others.

Collaboration was a steady theme throughout Song Summit, from the lab discussions to the musicians sharing the stages; there was a constant feeling of togetherness. With that feeling came the question of participation and what action items come next after the Song Summit is over.

How to take what was learned from the labs and put into action the ideas shared by the thoughtful participants rattled around my head as the weekend in the beautiful, scenic setting wound to an end.

“At Song Summit, we are programming with those cosmic moments in mind,” reads a quote by founder Ben Anderson on the PCSS website. “We’re creating an immersive experience centered around deeply impactful panel discussions, mountain-air wellness activities, and performances by some of the best artists of our time.”

Seeing so many of the musicians collaborating onstage together at Song Summit reinforced the guidance heard repeatedly from the panelists, who reiterated the importance of teamwork, community and friendship for both professional and personal success.

The first lab of this year’s Song Summit set the tone for my experience. The panels were held in an auditorium inside the Park City library, and began with Marcus King and Chef Andrew Zimmern’s “Soul Kitchen” discussion moderated by Colette Weintraub.

King and Zimmern co-hosted a pre-PCSS dinner at Le Depot Brasserie on Thursday night. The collaborative menu prepared by Zimmern pulled from King’s native South Carolina. Pre-dinner music was provided by members of the Trombone Shorty Academy and Primera Linea, who then led a post-dinner, New Orleans-style second-line parade from Le Depot Brasserie to the Marquis for performances by Duane Betts & Palmetto Motel, followed by Marcus King and Eric Krasno playing a collaborative set with keyboardist Adam MacDougall (who later played with Dawes and The Terrapin Family Band), drummer Jack Ryan and bassist Eric Vogel.

The next morning King and Zimmern were discussing their respective life journeys with Weintraub for the “Soul Kitchen” lab. The deeply personal talk explored the similarities between the demands of the music and culinary industries. Zimmern and King shared their individual paths toward sobriety and harrowing brushes with suicide.

The lab was emotional and uplifting, inspiring and educational. The message from both was clearly pointed toward having the humility to ask for help when you need it, and the empathy to be there to help others as often as you can.

King and Zimmern’s meal on Thursday evening and the subsequent opening lab on Friday morning nourished the mind and body equally, with a smoking show by King, Kraz and Betts sandwiched between. I would learn this would be repeated several more times over the weekend as the labs and live performances resonated with inspiring moments of collaboration and community building.

Getting from venue to venue – main stage performances were held in City Park – across the easily walkable city allowed for not only impressive daily step totals, but time to mentally digest in a gorgeously scenic setting the thought-provoking ideas volleyed around all weekend long.

Eric Krasno was busy throughout PCSS as a panelist and performer. Park City Song Summit founder Ben Anderson introduced “The Eternal Life Of The Grateful Dead” panel that saw Kraz joined fellow musician/moderator Ross James and veteran music entrepreneur Peter Shapiro. Given the three participants’ connections to Phil Lesh, the late Grateful Dead bassist was frequently at the heart of their chat that explored the legendary band’s lasting legacy.

Phil Lesh’s influence was also top of mind during the Krasno-moderated “American Rock ‘n’ Roll Band In 2025” lab with Goose’s Rick Mitarotonda and Peter Anspach and Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith and Griffin Goldsmith. Lesh’s words of wisdom (“‘Dark Star’ has no key”) were traded like currency among the musicians who weaved his influence into the musical stories of their lives that led them and their bands to Park City.

Phil’s son Grahame Lesh was supposed to appear at this year’s Song Summit but was forced to cancel to deal with a family emergency. Grahame’s Terrapin Family Band mates rallied in his absence and leaned into the event’s sense of community and collaboration, with Mitarotonda, Krasno, and the Goldsmiths playing with TXR before their set was cut short due to windy conditions on Saturday.

Mitarotonda and Krasno trading licks on “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo” and Jennifer Hartswick‘s powerful vocal performance on “Stella Blue” were highlights of the abbreviated set that also saw the Goldsmiths joining in on “Bertha” and “Althea.”

As previously reported, the “Dawes & Friends Feat. Duane Betts” set Friday saw guest spots by one-time touring member Betts, as well as Paul Hoffman of Greensky Bluegrass, and Krasno.

After joining his old mates on “Ramblin’ Man,” Betts noted on social media that he saves performing The Allman Brothers Band song, which was written by his late father Dickey Betts, for special moments.

“I try and save ‘Ramblin’ Man’ for special occasions but when my old bandmates and buddies asked I thought it was more than appropriate,” Betts wrote. “What a treat and honor to share the stage with [Dawes]! We played a few of their tunes too and I really had a ball! Let’s do it again soon.”

Taylor Goldsmith and Griffin Goldsmith came back out during Greensky Bluegrass’ set at Park City Song Summit for “Living Over.” Frequent GSBG cohort, keyboardist Holly Bowling, accompanied the string band for the entirety of their performance that also saw Krasno sit-in on “Born Again.”

Dawes ended their set with a cover of “Animal” by Goose, before they headlined the following night. Mitarotonda’s sit-in with The Terrapin Family Band, and later with LP Giobbi during her late-night Dead Set show at the Marquis, surrounded Goose’s two headlining sets.

Goose fit five songs from their surprise new studio album, Chain Yer Dragon, into their PCSS performance, which was somewhat surprisingly sans any special guests.

LP Giobbi and Hillary Gleason held the final lab of the weekend called “Being The Change.” LP Giobbi is a producer, entrepreneur and founder of the Femme House nonprofit, whose mission is to create “opportunities for women, gender-expansive, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ creatives in the technical and behind-the-scenes areas of music.”

Gleason has extensive experience in the nonprofit sector and founded Backline in 2019 to provide mental health and wellness resources to music industry professionals and their loved ones. Gleason talked about how the deaths of Jeff Austin and Neal Casal, who both died by suicide in 2019, spurred her to create Backline, which LP Giobbi enlisted for help finding the right therapist to work with.

The two shared a common experience growing up the children of Deadheads and detailed their close and supportive relationship, even going so far as sharing screenshots of their text messages.

The pair talked about how there is often a void for young people, particularly females, to be able to see themselves in adults they admire. Their stories reminded me of my two young daughters, who can look up to LP Giobbi and Gleason as leaders and role models, filling the gap in representation they identified as missing from their own trajectories in life. Their work will be what inspires the next generation of Song Summit thought leaders.

Considering it was the final Song Summit lab, “Being The Change” was not only the name of the panel, it was a summation of the entire experience. What was evident was that “change” takes on many forms, from breaking cycles of addiction to opening new lines of communication to being the representation you could not find in the world to lifting others up for the sake of being part of a community. It is up to each individual to find their path to a positive impact.

Park City Song Summit takes the power and beauty of live music and uses it as the agent for gathering people to not just dance together, but to pause for a collective mental and physical well-being check-in to make sure no one gets left behind.

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