John Mayer Committed To Dead & Company For Long Haul

For those who listened to guitarist John Mayer’s appearance on the SiriusXM talk show Tales From The Golden Road, his passion for Dead & Company and the music of the Grateful Dead was clear throughout. Mayer, along with Bob Weir, talked about Dead & Company in a call reported on by Billboard and said he “will never close the door on Dead & Company, ever.”

John added, “I think as long as there’s a desire to do it, I know how to carve time out. It’s always going to be worth doing. I will do Dead & Company as long as fans want it and as long as it feels like there’s something on the table to try to get right and explore.” The guitarist stopped work on a solo project when he got the original call to join the members of the Grateful Dead and feels his time in Dead & Company helped him after he returned to the solo project back in January. “It was actually really good to take time away from it and come back and see what are the songs that have stood the test of time and what I can do to this song to make it better,” Mayer explained. The guitarist expects to finish work on the solo album later this year in time for a 2017 release.

Another topic discussed was whether Dead & Company would write original material. “I think it’s fertile ground. I think only just now have we sort of gotten up to speed. It’s a left foot/right foot kind of deal; We have a lot of ground to cover before we get to that place, but I think we’re getting there. We don’t have any immediate plans, but I know it’s in the back of everybody’s head,” Weir said. John Mayer is open to new songs if the right situation emerges, “If it can state its case for the reason it needs to exist, then I would absolutely be up to doing it. It would have to come out of the earth. It can’t be planted from above the soil. There’s no reason it couldn’t be; I would actually be very interested to see what the band could do as composers and as improvisers — composing through improvisation, I think, is really interesting. But I’m open to anything this band could or wanted to do, as long as it answered that constant question, ‘Well, why?’ And if it has a strong answer, I’d love to do it.”

Dead & Company kicks off Summer Tour in Charlotte on June 10. Head to Billboard for more from John Mayer and Bob Weir on Dead & Company.

[Hat Tip – @TheDeadBlog]