John Mayer appeared on Tales from the Golden Road on SiriusXM Grateful Dead radio to talk to Gary Lambert about his experience touring with Dead & Company.

“I represent a certain segment of the crowd,” he opens up by explaining. “These are my first Dead shows too.”

He goes on to address the naysayers who questioned the Dead’s decision to bring him on or thought he wasn’t up for the role of Jerry.

“I knew that the news of this would throw people off, but I also think the band and I knew that when people heard it it was going to validate itself. So when people were rightfully scratching their heads, which I always thought gave a little power to the whole thing, I felt like I wasn’t abusing people’s attention because I always felt like there was something substantial happening musically.”

“On a musical level you can’t get bored,” he continues. “What you have to do at the end of every night is put all the notes back in the bag, put all the Scrabble tiles back in the little bag and go, tomorrow’s a new night, and when you take out something tomorrow, nobody heard last night’s notes, so all of those notes sort of return themselves to pristineness. You can’t play the beginning of the DC show acting like its the third set of the Philly show.”

Listen to the full interview below.

[Photo by Adam Straughn]