The Grateful Dead’s 100 Most Essential Songs: The Music Never Stops is an interactive guide to the Grateful Dead’s 100 Most Essential Songs. We think it’s unique among the many, many books about the Grateful Dead. It’s the first book to focus on the Dead’s live performance repertoire and narrow down the nearly 500 different songs they performed to what we consider the 100 essential songs. It’s interactive because each of the 100 songs we discuss has links to the full lyrics and to several outstanding performances of the song. As a result, you can listen to each song while you read about it, and this is true whether you have a hard copy or the e-book version.

Here’s what you’ll find in the book:

• Preface: Here we explain who we are, and how and why we wrote the book.
• Introduction: This focuses on the history, musicians and evolution of the Grateful Dead.  It emphasizes their broad musical background, their very special “jamming” and unique performances, and how their music continues to be ever more popular.
• Quick Start Guide: This suggests how you can use your favorite musical genre to get started listening to the Dead, regardless of your level of familiarity with their music.
• The 100 Essential Songs: This is the alphabetical list of the songs we discuss in as much detail as space allows, and includes the links mentioned above.
• Bonus Tracks:  Like most album re-issues do, we’ve added some bonus tracks: twenty additional Grateful Dead songs that almost made our “essential” list.
• Online Resources: Here you’ll find links to many, many Grateful Dead related resources we find to be helpful.
• Bibliography: We list here the published sources we used for quotations and context in our song discussions.
• Acknowledgements:  In this section, we thank those who helped us write the book.