What are the limits of what the past can return to us—and can we make the record jump the loop?

Dead Dad Club is the lucid, prismatic memoir of Katie Moulton, a millennial music critic who grew up in a die-hard rock-and-roll family, about her father’s unexpected death from addiction shortly before her 17th birthday, and the music obsession she inherited from him that shaped her early adulthood. A quintessentially American tale about family, grief, identity, and dependency, set in the Midwest and scored in the writer’s imagination by the timeless Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Dead Dad Club follows Katie as she navigates her grief and moves to Bloomington, Indiana–the town where her parents began their love story–to write and work as a radio DJ, spinning records that defined her father, a former record-store manager, and her relationship to him. In struggling to carve out her own space, she grapples with the inevitable questions of one’s 20s: How should we relate to our families as we become our own people? Are we fated to become our parents, or can we change the narrative?

Scored with entirely original music by Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Dead Dad Club collapses the space between joy and sorrow, and what emerges is a personal yet universal story that spans genres and eras, richly told with tenderness, humor, and the knowledge of how nostalgia colors our lives—even as we endeavor to push forward past our grief.