Bob Crawford has been handling bass, violin, and backing vocals for the Avett Brothers since essentially the beginning of the band in 2001. Beyond his musical interests, he’s also a huge history buff, which has led to a different creative pursuit: He just launched a new six-part podcast about John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States. Titled Founding Son: John Quincy’s America, it features the voices of Nick Offerman and Patrick Warburton (David Puddy from Seinfeld) as well as Crawford’s bandmate Scott Avett.

As he tells the New York Times, Crawford got really into reading books about America’s founding fathers on the tour bus, starting with Sean Wilentz’s The Rise Of American Democracy: Jefferson To Lincoln and moving on to tomes about Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, the rise of the two-party system, and the congressional debates over slavery in the 1830s — essentially the whole period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, an era known as the Early Republic. His studies led him to the conclusion that Adams, son of the country’s second president John Adams, is a crucially important and under-appreciated figure from that phase of American history.

Adams was a vocal opposition to slavery in the House of Representatives, where he was the only president to serve in Congress after his presidency. “He knows democracy is on the line, he knows slavery is a moral evil,” Crawford told the Times. “He’s one of those transcendent characters. He deserves to be in the pantheon.”

Scott Avett voices various historical figures in the podcast. Regarding Crawford, he told the NYT, “He does hold a lot of facts, and it’s really impressive. But that’s not the point, which is how he carries those facts and who he is when expressing them.” Wilentz, the historian whose book inspired Crawford’s deep dive into the Early Republic, also appears on the podcast and was impressed with Crawford’s knowledge: “He’s really quite versed. He had a lot of really specific questions to ask, some of which I didn’t know the answer to.”

Founding Son premieres today on iHeartRadio, which does not feel like the most natural home for an American history podcast. But after hosting a docuseries called Concerts Of Change for SiriusXM, Crawford received an invite to pitch a show to iHeart. Initially they balked, but eventually his enthusiasm sold them on the project. All available episodes of the pod can be found here.