On Thursday, John Mayer played an intimate show Amagansett, NY’s Stephen Talkhouse. The gig, a celebrity-filled SiriusXM event, was the guitarist’s first full US date of the year and featured the ace band of drummer Aaron Sterling, percussionist Lenny Castro, bassist Sean Hurley, guitarists Isaiah Sharkey and David Ryan Harris, keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, and vocalists Tiffany Palmer and Carlos Ricketts. Ahead of Mayer’s performance, he spoke with SiriusXM host and Bravo personality Andy Cohen on a range of topics, including the future of Dead & Company. Mayer explained, “I was talking to USA Today about Grateful Dead listening party on Channel 4/Life With John Mayer and that I was really enjoying just being a listener of the music and I said to some extent I’ve gone back to my corner, and I think I just—part of the grieving process is to hang it up. If you don’t hang it up, then you don’t grieve fully, so I’m in the process right now and I think people—or at least I hope they can decode this. I’m not thinking beyond just the healing and the grieving, as so many other people are doing along with me, that it doesn’t feel right to think about it, but in no way is that my—I’m not swearing it off. I’m not saying like, ‘You’ll never see me on stage doing that.’ I don’t know how you will yet, and I don’t really want to start thinking about actionable ways to do it. I kind of want to wallow a little. I kind of—I think it’s important sometimes to say, ‘Well, that’s that,’ so that you can feel it and go through that and mourn that, so I hope people understand that, and if they don’t, then maybe I’ve sort of helped. I don’t have any specific plan.”
Cohen then replied, “It sounds to me like what you’re saying is you need time to finish grieving and then you’ll think about it,” to which Mayer responded, “I’ll think about it. Let me just hang up the jersey for a minute.”
Cohen and Mayer, who are good friends, also discussed the singer/guitarist mixing a new single in the host’s bedroom. Mayer replied, “I am mixing the first single in Andy’s bedroom. Andy’s taken a different room. Again, we always get ourselves into a little bit of mayhem when we explain things but don’t explain them fully. Andy has given me his bedroom, and he has taken a different bedroom. Now, in order to mix this single and have it out in time, I had to rent studio monitors that are now set up on stands in his bedroom and I woke up this morning, and I mixed the single from bed with these monitors in front of me. All that’s left now is to find these moments and songs that really delight me to make them and that means the songs are going to be different because I’ve made so many songs that at one point I went, Yeah, that’s who I want to be,” and then I did those, and I sang those, and I have those, and so I’ve sort of come all the way back around to a very simple, direct thing, so when you hear me sing on this record, you go like, ‘Oh, he’s right in front of me,’ so there’s no tricks with like, ‘Oh, I’m sort of like my vocal is coming right up the middle,’ and all I can do is say like I liked it enough to finish it. I like it enough to put it out and I think it’s cool. It’s cool, and I like it a lot. When I was younger, I had a lot longer phrases for things and it’s cool, and I like it a lot.”
During Thursday’s performance, Mayer also paid tribute to Dolly Parton by offering a bit of her “I Will Always Love You” during his hit “Gravity.” While speaking with Cohen pre-show for their interview, Mayer also said of the singer, “The world came together in a way that it hadn’t in a very long time to celebrate someone. While the world is paying tribute to one person and one soul, which feels good on its own, we’re all connected while that’s happening. I haven’t felt connected like that for a long time.”
Mayer has yet to perform the Dead’s music since leading a sing-along rendition of “Ripple” at Bob Weir’s public memorial in January. Cohen’s full interview with Mayer aired on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy on Friday, August 28 at 10 am ET.
