“I Will Take You Home”

Brent Mydland, the Grateful Dead’s keyboard player from 1979 until 1990, wrote this lullaby for his two young daughters, with John Perry Barlow. The band began playing it live in June 1988, more than a year before it was released, and performed it more than 30 times over two years, usually in the second set as a quiet moment, one of the few Dead songs with no guitar solo at all. It was recorded for Built to Last, released on Halloween 1989, the band’s final studio album. Brent died the next July, at only 38. When the Seattle Times wrote his obituary, this was the song it remembered him by: a father’s lullaby, sung to thousands.