We Can't Hide - Inspiration Thursday

The Grateful Dead, in my opinion, didn't really make many songs with obvious, in-you-face social or political messages and I actually quite like that.  They are more poetic,  universal, and transcendent than that usually.  But, there is one activist type song that I have always enjoyed.  I first noted it because I adore Brent Mydland's throaty, passionate voice (and handsome red beard). I suppose that Brent could be seen as a minor player in the bigger picture of Grateful Dead as he was with them just 11 years of their four decades of playing.  But, I don't see him that way.  His time with the band was cut short--as was his life--by troubles he handled with substance abuse, a fact which hurts my heart to think of.  But, in that 11 years he played some epic, soaring keyboard solos that showed no hint of any inner troubles and he wrote some lovely songs, including the Grateful Dead's environmentalist ballad We Can Run But We Can't Hide.  He would have turned 60 last October, but at least his beautiful voice and so many other gifts have been left behind for us to cherish long after his passing.

"We Can Run But We Can't Hide"
Words by John Perry Barlow; music by Brent Mydland

We don't own this place, though we act as if we did,
It's a loan from the children of our children's kids.
The actual owners haven't even been born yet.

But we never tend the garden and rarely we pay the rent,
Some of it is broken and the rest of it is bent
Put it all on plastic and I wonder where we'll be when the bills hit.

We can run,
But we can't hide from it.
Of all possible worlds,
We only got one:
We gotta to ride on it.
Whatever we've done,
We'll never get far from what we leave behind,
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can't hide.
Oh no, we can't hide.

I'm dumpin' my trash in your back yard
Makin' certain you don't notice really isn't so hard
You're so busy with your guns and all of your excuses to use them.

Well, it's oil for the rich and babies for the poor,
We got everyone believin' that more is more,
If a reckoning comes, maybe we will know what to do then.

We can run,
But we can't hide from it.
Of all possible worlds,
We only got one:
We gotta to ride on it.
Whatever we've done,
We'll never get far from what we leave behind,
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can't hide.
Oh no, we can't hide.

All these complications seem to leave no choice,
I heard the tongues of billions speak with just one voice,
Saying, "Just leave all the rest to me,
I need it worse than you, you see."
And then I heard...
The sound of one child crying.

Today I went walking in the amber wind,
There's a hole in the sky where the light pours in
I remembered the days when I wasn't afraid of the sunshine.
But now it beats down on the asphalt land
Like a hammering blow from God's left hand
What little still grows cringes in the shade like a bad vine.

We can run,
But we can't hide from it.
Of all possible worlds,
We only got one:
We gotta to ride on it.
Whatever we've done,
We'll never get far from what we leave behind,
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can't hide.
Oh no, we can't hide.