Touch of Grey
1987 single by the Grateful Dead

"Touch of Grey" is a 1987 single by the Grateful Dead, and is from the album In the Dark.
The music was composed by Jerry Garcia, and the lyrics were written by Robert Hunter. The song was released as the first single from In the Dark and became the band's only top 10 hit on Billboard Hot 100. Peaking at No. 9, it also reached No. 1 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
Background
"Touch of Grey" was first performed as an encore on September 15, 1982, at the Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland, and was finally released on In the Dark in 1987. It was released as a single with "My Brother Esau" and later "Throwing Stones", and has appeared on a number of albums and collections.
The song's refrain features the lines "I will get by / I will survive" and combines dark lyrics in the verses with upbeat pop instrumentation. The final chorus changes the pronoun to "We will get by / We will survive".
“Touch of Grey” enters the record as 1987 single by the Grateful Dead. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Touch, Grey and single can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1247572. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1987 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Touch of Grey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.