It’s been two weeks since LOCKN’ Music Festival took over Arrington, Virginia, and the content continues to roll out. While pro-shot video of Foundations of Funk, Lettuce‘s JGB set, and all the collaborations continue to come across our screens, the festival has also released a new podcast episode. In the first episode of The Relix Audio Hour‘s collaboration with Eric Krasno, the “Conversations with Kraz” series, the Soulive and Lettuce guitarist invites Dead & Company‘s John Mayer to discuss their crafts.
Taking place at the festival, the two guitarists bounced the conversation off of their surroundings, musing at the history that inspired the festival as well as their own art forms. As Relix summarizes,
Mayer, who was onsite to play four sets with Dead & Company (along with a couple guest spots), and Krasno, who shared the stage with Mayer on Saturday as the two sat in during Krasno former band Lettuce’s late-night Jerry Garcia Band tribute, begin their sprawling discussion on the topic of songwriting, with both covering their differing approaches to the craft throughout their careers. The conversation then shifts, apropos to their LOCKN’ surroundings, to the guitarists’ appreciation and discovery of the music of the Grateful Dead, along with their love of musicians like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan (and lamenting the lack of guitar heroes who made it past 40). The duo also jokes throughout about various guitar minutiae, including how Mayer self-deprecatingly describes some of his onstage work:
“That’s what I call practicing on stage: You play a lick that you almost landed, then you just start taking stage time to basically try to nail a skateboard trick. It’s the guitar equivalent! Then you listen back to it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, no!’”
You can listen to this episode, and check out the rest of The Relix Audio Hour, hosted by Jesse Lauter, and with previous episodes with Don Was and David Fricke, on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.
