If you watched the Fare Thee Well Santa Clara webcasts this weekend, you may have noticed a soundtrack to the hour-long setbreak. As it turns out, that music was all composed and arranged by CRB and Ryan Adams & the Cardinals guitarist Neal Casal. As he told Billboard, Casal assembled a cast of musicians after Bill Kreutzmann’s son Justin asked him to come up with a minimum of five hours of original music to serve as the setbreak music which was set to images from the Grateful Dead’s history.

Casal made it clear that the goal was to capture the vibe of the Dead, not imitate the band directly. “We would do something in the the realm of ‘The Wheel,’ but isn’t ‘The Wheel,’ or we’d go for the general vibe of ‘Playing in the Band.’ We had some guidelines to work from, but we just went from there,” he said.

Among the musicians gathered by Casal included CRB bandmate Adam MacDougall, Dan Horne (a Cass McCombs associate) and drummer Mark Levy of Congress. “We’d start out in the style of a Dead song but eventually stray from the script and end up in these spaces where none of us had been before. It became quite an adventure, which didn’t end up sounding like the Grateful Dead, but was in the spirit of the band,” Casal explained of the process.

As for Casal’s thoughts on the shows, he said he thought Trey Anastasio did “such a good job” as his role as lead guitarist. “He doesn’t command your attention, but if you pay attention, it sounds great. It didn’t seem burdened at all. It was a light feeling all night long.”