Song Explanation
"Lie in Our Graves" is one of many songs in the band's catalog with a carpe diem theme, speaking to the importance of embracing what life has to offer ("When I step into the light / My arms are open wide") while one still can ("I can't believe that we would lie in our graves / Wondering if we had spent our living days well"). Its merry, upbeat feel in the face of dark subject matter is reminiscent of a lot of the band's other earlier songs such as "What Would You Say", "Tripping Billies", and most famously, "Ants Marching".
It has been introduced by Matthews in a wide variety of ways, running from the succinct (Matthews frequently will jibe, "This is a song about being dead") to the introspective. During a performance from Marcus Amphitheater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 23, 1996, Matthews had this to say about it:
"This is a song that sings about the hopes that when we all get to the end of our lives, that we'll feel pretty good about what we did, so don't compromise yourself."
The song was originally titled "Peanuts".
Read more about this topic: Lie In Our Graves
Famous quotes containing the words song and/or explanation:
“Awake, O north wind, and come, O south wind! Blow upon my garden that its fragrance may be wafted abroad. Let my beloved come to his garden, and eat its choicest fruits.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Song of Solomon 4:16.
“How strange a scene is this in which we are such shifting figures, pictures, shadows. The mystery of our existence—I have no faith in any attempted explanation of it. It is all a dark, unfathomed profound.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)