Amanda Knox and Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready Play With Exoneree Band

When Amanda Knox was locked away in an Italian prison in 2007 for a murder she didn’t commit, she’d find solace in singing. “Most of the people in prison knew my voice before they knew who I was,” she says; she favored sad songs by folks like Joanna Newsom and Regina Spektor. “People would hear me sing, and then they would yell down the hallway to hear certain songs. So I was basically like the jukebox for a while.” After a prison priest taught her how to play piano, she would practice on a paper keyboard in her room.

Eddie Lowery had a similar experience back in the Eighties, locked up in a Kansas facility for a rape he’s since been cleared of, noodling on a guitar his mother sent him. “At night, I would put my headphones on and I’d listen to the local rock-music station,” he says. “I’d lay there pretending I was onstage, playing next to these guys, with my guitar.”

And then there’s Bill Dillon, who wrote his first song on a roll of toilet paper after being hosed down and sent to solitary back in the 1980s. The track was called “Black Robes and Lawyers,” and he honed it using gear Lynyrd Skynyrd donated to his Florida facility.

“It was basically a statement: Why isn’t anybody listening to me?” he says. Dillon was wrongly convicted in 1981 for murder, and neither of the titular figures in the song title were swayed by his claims of innocence.

Flash forward to 2025, and all three of these formerly incarcerated people have been exonerated — Knox in 2015 after serving nearly four years, Lowery in 2003 after nine years, and Dillon in 2008 after 27 years. Now, their musical dreams are coming true. All three are members of the Exoneree Band, an iteration of which recently performed with Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready at the annual Innocence Project Conference in Seattle.

“It was a joyous yet really heavy environment in terms of psychologically and healing,” McCready says. His wife, Ashley, is the board president of the Washington state branch of the Innocence Project and helped him get involved. “I think music is critical to healing humans.”

The Exoneree Band got their start in 2011 at a conference in Cincinnati, playing that song Dillon wrote on a roll of toilet paper. “We did kind of a talent show among our exonerees from all different projects from all over the country,” says Lara Zarowsky, an executive and policy director of the Washington Innocence Project. “There’s a lot of talent in our community, as you might imagine. One of the main ways that some of them have made it through prison was through music.” 

The original lineup was Lowery (lead guitar), Dillon (guitar and bass), Darby Tillis (vocals and bass), Antoine Day (vocals and drums), and Raymond Towler (guitars and keys). Together, the guys had served a collective 85 years. “We realized that we were better together, as a band,” says Dillon, who is currently on a break from the group while he awaits a heart transplant. “I had a catalog, so it was easy for us to go right out and play. We were raising awareness about wrongful convictions.

The band has since played at Innocence Project concerts across the country and any stage that will have it; Grammy-winning producer Jim Tulio even produced Dillon’s 2014 solo record. Tillis died in 2014, and Dillon has been off the road, but they’re still considered part of the band — which now includes Knox on vocals and bassist Ted Bradford, who was exonerated after 10 years for a rape that DNA evidence proved he did not commit. 

On April 5, the band hit the Rabbit Box in Seattle after the 2025 conference, where McCready filled in on guitar. “We did a couple of Pearl Jam songs,” he says. Namely “Black” and “Yellow Ledbetter, which Knox sang backup on. “I don’t generally do those songs with anybody except for my band, but this is such an important occasion that I felt like: I’ll do whatever these guys want to do, and I feel honored to be part of it.”

Knox, a Seattle native who advocates against wrongful convictions, has known Pearl Jam for years. “They reached out to me when I first came home, because they had long been really supportive of these cases,” she says. “Truly the first exoneree that I ever met was Damian Echols through Pearl Jam, at Eddie Vedder’s house. It was just the most awesome thing to just be rocking out with Mike on the stage at the Rabbit Box.”

“She has great intuition,” McCready adds. “While we were playing, she was singing backup for ‘Black’ and totally adding this cool dimension of pain and beauty and magic. I was playing along with it and catching it.”

The band also played a few of Lowery’s originals, such as “Name of Justice,” about our broken court system, and “My Cell,” which he wrote about those nights spent listening to the radio, picturing himself playing alongside his heroes. It’s a dream that was realized that night as the band stood toe-to-toe with a Nineties legend.

Knox, who says she’s been into music since she was old enough to belt Disney songs, says she’s next in line to teach the band some originals. She recently released her memoir, Free. “I gave the group a whole bunch of original songs that I’ve made in the meantime,” she says, adding that she’s been working with Chris Ballew of Presidents of the United States of America. “The band just has a really special bond. I think it’s really great that we get the opportunity not just to tell our stories, but to tell our stories through an art form. It’s always been a source of comfort for me.”