In a 2008 interview for Acoustic Guitar magazine, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead shared the story of writing “The Music Never Stopped” with his childhood pal John Perry Barlow. The Dead recorded the song on Blues for Allah (1975), and it remained a staple of the band's live repertoire.

As a lyricist I’m glacially slow. I can generally get the job done, but it takes too damned long. So I like to work with people who have a little more facility with that—you know, John Barlow, Garrett Grant, Robert Hunter.

Or I may have a general notion of the color of the rhythm and the harmonic or melodic development, and I’ll sit with a guy and we just fire blank verse at each other until we start to corner that color—and then often the song will fall right out of the sky. Other times, I may have no notion of where the song wants to go, in which case I’ll let whoever I’m working with surprise me. . . .

“The Music Never Stopped” is a song that we wrote over the telephone. I had this business going so I played this over the phone to John, and he just started spitting stuff at me. The first line came out, “There’s mosquitoes on the river / Fish are rising up like birds.” He was living in Wyoming at the time on a ranch, and he started describing a situation that I’d seen with him, where it was late summer on a dry year and things were hot and kind of dull and dead.

So where are we going to take this? Well, first I figured the verse is going to have to be twice as long as I originally figured, because if you’re starting with an image that thick, you have to get into some detail about it. “It’s been hot for seven weeks now / Too hot to even speak now / Did you hear what I just heard?” That last line came after some deliberation. It’s a pregnant line, sort of like a leading tone in a harmonic development.

The success of the endeavor, if you’re working with a lyricist, depends on how closely the lyric marries the music. With Barlow or Gerrit Graham or whoever, there’s a lot of back and forth. I guess I get to be the decider, because the words are going to have to come from my lips. And so I have to be able to tell the story.

I have to be that character, because my job is to get the hell out of the way and let the character tell the story, musically and lyrically. When I’m standing in front of the microphone, I may look like me, but I’m not.

If the character arrives with a really defined face and features, then it’s easy for me to do my job.

—Bob Weir