JamFest • Live Nuggets • October 16, 2026

Bob Weir’s Birthday Gift to the World: A Previously Unreleased Studio Track Featuring John Mayer Has Arrived

Rhino Records • Blue Mountain Vault Sessions • JamFestRadio.com

Nine months after his passing, Bobby Weir turned 79 yesterday. Rhino Records marked the occasion by opening the vault.

The release of “The Ground Don’t Want Me” on October 16, 2026 is the kind of gift that the Grateful Dead community receives with a specific mixture of grief and gratitude that only posthumous archival work can produce. Bob Weir passed in January 2026, nine months before what would have been his 79th birthday, and the decision by Rhino Records to mark that birthday by opening the vault for a track that has never been heard publicly is both a generous act of archival stewardship and a reminder of how much recorded music Weir left behind in forms that the public has not yet encountered. The song arrives not as a consolation but as a discovery, proof that the creative legacy of one of American music’s most enduring figures continues to expand even after the man himself is gone.

The backstory of the track is one that will immediately captivate anyone who has followed the intersection of Bob Weir and John Mayer over the past decade. “The Ground Don’t Want Me” was recorded nearly ten years ago during the original 2016 studio sessions for Blue Mountain, Weir’s cowboy-themed solo album that marked his most sustained and ambitious solo statement in decades. Those sessions produced a record that was widely praised for its spare, acoustic seriousness and for the way it demonstrated that Weir, then in his late sixties, was still fully capable of making music that operated on its own terms rather than as an extension of the Grateful Dead legacy. What those sessions also produced, apparently, was at least one complete track that never made the final cut and that has been sitting in the Rhino vault for the better part of a decade waiting for exactly this moment.

What makes “The Ground Don’t Want Me” genuinely surprising rather than simply archivally interesting is the identity of its featured musician. John Mayer plays acoustic lead guitar throughout the track, and his presence on a Blue Mountain outtake represents something that most Deadheads did not know existed: the only official studio recording of Mayer and Weir playing together. By 2016 Mayer had already joined Dead and Company, the touring configuration that brought him into the Grateful Dead orbit alongside Weir, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Oteil Burbridge, and his presence in that band had been both celebrated and scrutinized in the way that any outsider entering a tradition that protective of its own history inevitably is. But none of that Dead and Company activity produced studio recordings, and Mayer’s name appeared nowhere on the original Blue Mountain release. “The Ground Don’t Want Me” is therefore the only place in the official catalog where Mayer and Weir exist together on a studio recording, a fact that gives the track a historical significance that extends beyond its considerable musical merits.

The songwriting credits add another layer of interest. The lyrics were written by Josh Ritter, the Idaho-born singer-songwriter whose literary sensibility and acoustic craft have made him one of the most respected figures in the contemporary folk and Americana world. Ritter’s connection to this material runs deep enough that he later recorded his own version of the song for his 2019 album Fever Breaks, which means that “The Ground Don’t Want Me” has a documented parallel life in the Ritter catalog that most listeners will be discovering now for the first time as they encounter the Weir version. The music was co-written by Ritter, producer Josh Kaufman, and Weir himself, making the track a genuine three-way collaboration between artists whose individual bodies of work are each substantial and whose work together produced something that neither would have made alone.

The release of “The Ground Don’t Want Me” is also the first indication of what is coming on November 20, 2026, when Rhino will release the Blue Mountain 10th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. That expanded release will dig further into the vault, surfacing more unreleased studio outtakes from the original Blue Mountain sessions alongside live performances captured during Weir’s 2016 Campfire Tour, the acoustic touring configuration that brought him to intimate theaters across the country in support of the album and that produced some of the most emotionally affecting performances of his later career. For anyone who followed those Campfire Tour shows and remembers the specific atmosphere of a Bob Weir acoustic theater performance in the years before his death, the prospect of hearing previously unheard recordings from that tour is the kind of archival promise that makes November 20 a date worth marking on the calendar immediately.

JamFest has been playing Bob Weir since the station began because his music, from the earliest Grateful Dead recordings through the most recent Dead and Company live performances to the Blue Mountain sessions, represents one of the most sustained and distinctive creative voices in American music history. He played rhythm guitar in a way that no other musician in any genre has replicated before or since, holding down a rhythmic center that gave Garcia the space to explore and simultaneously providing a harmonic commentary that was itself a form of improvisation. “The Ground Don’t Want Me” adds a new chapter to that story, and on what would have been his 79th birthday, that feels like exactly the right thing to have happen.

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Happy birthday, Bobby. The ground may not want you, but we do. Every week, on JamFest.