During the recording of the album Garcia said of it: “…it’s musically the most adventurous album we’ve done in a pretty long time. Our development has been to synthesize various forms … Now we’re working on creating styles rather than being eclectic of synthesizing other styles. This it’s a little bit more difficult, and considerably more experimental. It’s still questionable as to whether the thing will be successful musically…”

Garcia spoke of the recording of Blues For Allah in an interview collected in The Grateful Dead: A Look Back: “I think that’s the first record we’ve made in years where we really had fun. … We laughed a lot and got good and crazy. We had an opportunity to get weirder than we normally get to getting. We all went on the trip of ‘Well, we’re gonna make a record, and we’re gonna go in the studio with no preconceptions and with no material’…”

Garcia also spoke about Blues For Allah in a later interview: “We kind of made a ground rule for that record: ‘Let’s make a record where we get together every day and we don’t bring anything in.’… The whole idea was to get back to that band thing, where the band makes the main contribution to the evolution of the material. So we’d go into the studio and jam for a while, and then if something nice turned up we’d say, ‘Well let’s preserve this little hunk and work with it, see if we can’t do something with it.’ And that’s how we did most of the album.”