Quite possibly Dave Matthews Band’s best album yet — Indeed, Rolling Stone awarded the record that distinction in June 2009 — Big Whiskey and The GrooGrux King is more or less a tribute album to the late LeRoi Moore, who died in August 2009 in an ATV wreck. Moore was DMB’s saxophonist. The album is also, more or less, the band’s most inward-looking project to date, the lyrics of which deal with questions of ultimate meaning. Matthews, in the past, has not shied away from talking about death and the big questions of life in other works. A few examples are worth mentioning. In “Lie In Our Graves,” he speaks of a person being content and resolved with one’s choices in life:

I can’t believe that we would
lie in our graves
Wondering if we had
spent our living days well
I can’t believe that we would
lie in our graves
Dreaming of things that we
might have been.

And in Gravedigger, Matthews recasts characters who either lived long, prosperous lives or who were cut short. The verses serve as vignettes of individuals, while the chorus reads:

Gravedigger
When you dig my grave
Could you make it shallow
So that I can feel the rain

“Big Whiskey” (Lyrics to the album can be found here), however, offers the most sustained DMB look at life’s deepest questions, and the message seems to be that human existence, always with the Moore’s life as context, presents opportunities for far more exquisite joy, marvel and transcendence than any of the preachments offered by religion. GrooGrux, I should note, is either a nickname for Moore himself or for a group of various members of the band. After the introductory piece, a haunting and airy saxophone aria, in the second track, ”Shake Me Like a Monkey,” listeners are early on introduced to the direction the album will take:

The thing I like about you
Is the way you
The way that you do
The thing I like about you

God or the devil alone
Could not have made you up
The two must have worked as one together

So good just wanna eat you up
Nothing like the real thing
Lick your sticky fingers boy
And sing for your dinner sing

Come on pretty baby
Make me lose my mind
Everybody get together
Gonna make love shine

“Funny the Way It Is” was written with the same idea in mind as that of “Ironic” by Alanis Morissette. While not addressing religion directly, the DMB song does deal with the often perplexing idiosyncrasies of life in which, for example, a soldier may die serving overseas, while days or weeks later, his son or daughter is born fresh and anew in the States.

In “Lying in the Hands of God,” “God” is a metaphor for a beloved partner in love, in which the character in the song finds more heartening warmth, compassion and fulfillment in the soft touch of another, than in that of pronouncements coming from the faithful:

Save your sermons for someone that’s afraid to love
If you knew what I feel then you couldn’t be so sure
I’ll be right here lying in the hands of God

If you feel angels in your head
Teardrop of joy runs down your face
You will rise

Matthews has made no bones about describing the next tune, “Why I Am,” as being about death itself, with Moore as the implicit subject. I referenced the song in the introduction to this blog here. Matthews told Relix magazine:

This song is definitely about death. The whole thing of ‘When my ghost takes me from you, you will remember the fool that I am, so don’t cry, baby don’t cry.’ The urgency of living, I think, is very present in this song. We played it once in [the initial group improv sessions in] Charlottesville, and Roi said ‘I love that jam.’ The horns on that particular song are from that first time we ever played it, before it was really a song, before it had a chorus or any bridges; from that, we have Roi’s performance.

I believe this song to be the most crushing critique of religion on the album. It addresses the many contradictions in which humanity, particularly immature and frightened and unlearned humanity, first attempted to mount the heights from a stupified understanding of life, Earth and the cosmos to the evolution of religion and the many injustices it has heaped on humanity, slavery, the Crusades and the biblically-ordained burning of innocent women thought to be witches, being only a few among them. Here are a some excerpts from the song:

I grew from monkey into man
Then I crushed 15 million with a wave of my hand
I grew drunk on water turned into wine
‘Til I was slave and master at the same damn time

It’s why I am
It’s why I am
Why I am still here dancing with the GrooGrux King …

A king of men it makes no sense
When I bow to the priest
While I worship the witch

It’s why I am always the one to make you smile
It’s why I am still a snake in the woodpile
Why I am still here dancing with the GrooGrux King …

It’s why I am unlikely to agree
It’s why I am climbing out of my monkey tree
Why I am still here dancing with the Groogrux King
We’ll be drinking big whiskey while we dance and sing
And when my story ends it’s gonna end with him
Heaven or hell I’m going there with the Groogrux King

These lines seem to most heavily reference evolution and man’s ascension, or descension if we read Darwin, from lower forms of life. And I also get the sense that, at the same time, it’s summoning the Bible’s story about Adam and Eve in the garden with its “snake in the woodpile” line, since man, indeed, became cursed directly because of influence from the serpent in the garden. This assumes, of course, that we take the biblical story in Genesis to be literally true, which, of course, it’s not. But this does not mean, however, that we can’t look at the story in literary terms and draw analogies from it.

The next song, “Dive In,” presents a character that seems to be gripped by both the more ugly details of our reality, poverty, for instance, but yet glories in the simple and natural pleasures of melting ice and summer’s coming on:

Tell me everything will be OK
If I just stay on my knees and keep praying
Believing in something
Tell me everything is all taken care of
By those qualified to take care of it all

Wake up sleepy head I think the sun’s a little brighter today
Smile and watch the icicles melt away and see the waters rising
Summer’s here to stay and that sweet summer breeze will blow forever
Go down to the shore kick off your shoes dive in the empty ocean

One day do you think we’ll wake up
In a world on its way to getting better
And if so
Can you tell me
How

“Spaceman” again pits human traits, like the love of excess, and love itself against the other.

Not all bad but I’m a faithful sinner
I might get lost but I’ll be home for dinner
If God don’t like me he can send me to hell
But I love the way you love me girl
I love the way you move

I prayed to heaven to keep my place
But I looked in the mirror saw the devil’s face
I’d be a dog for a tail to chase
But I love the way you kiss me baby
I love the way you talk baby

All the freaks are on parade
I wanna fill my belly so I gotta get paid
Doesn’t everybody deserve to have the good life
But it don’t always work out
So cry cry baby if we must
But just remember
Just remember
I love the way you move baby

After the character says he’s a “faithful sinner,” which is another way of saying he’s wholly human, the third line pronounces, “If God don’t like me he can send me to hell, but I love the way you love me girl.” This is yet another way Matthews seems to always comes back to trumpeting the human experience over religious preachments. The line just mentioned, admittedly, is a simply-worded portrayal of the doctrine of eternal judgment, since doctrinally, God doesn’t send people to hell outright, but he does so implicitly by being both all-powerful and all-loving enough to see that not a single person is harmed, spiritually or otherwise, and yet does nothing to prevent it.

Sonically, “Squirm” appears to be the most ominous of them all, with its injunctions to

Don’t be dead before you die
Hunger ’til fed
Give love instead
And when it gets inside
Watch the dead man squirm
Above all things
If kindness is your king
Then heaven will be yours
Before you meet your end

“Alligator Pie” is a remembrance on the Hurricana Katrina tragedy in New Orleans, and it sheds light on religious announcements that commonly, predictably and contradictably claim the Lord should invariably be praised when living people are found among the drenched ruins, but the devil and our fallen world are to blame for those among the dead:

Storm went right on by
Thanked the Lord everybody’s alright
Don’t mean to throw off a second line
But the devil broke the levee and left us here to die

Nearly incessantly, in the most musically frenetic song on the album, “Time Bomb,” religious themes continue:

If Martians fell from the sky
What would that do to God
Would we put the weapon down
Or aim it up at the sky
No one would believe it except the fuckin’ nut jobs
They’d laugh and cry “we told you so!”

Baby when I get home
I wanna believe in Jesus
Hammer in the final nail
Help me pick up the pieces

With a beautiful and inspirational chorus, “You & me” continues the album’s ubiquitous conversation with Moore’s memory, as the band member’s friends, or alternatively, a beloved. I can only assume Moore was beloved by his bandmates as well, but it’s often difficult to determine, just from song lyrics, whether the meaning is toward love among best friends or love among romantic friends. Regardless, the final song seems to leave the religious diction altogether in order to focus on “you & me” traveling to see what marvels might lie at the end of the world. And, perhaps, the end of the world might imply the boundary at which our human experience or scientific discovery meets its endgame, thus touching, and coming full circle, to the unknowable, or if we insist, the eternal. We can only wonder as to the ultimate meaning, of course, but here are the final stanzas of the record:

You and I we’re not tied
To the ground
Not falling but rising
Like rolling around
Eyes closed above the
Rooftops eyes closed
We’re gonna
Spin through
The stars

Our arms wide as the
Sky we’re gonna ride
The blue all the way
To the end of the world
All the way to the
End of the world
Oh and when the kids
Are old enough we’re
Gonna teach them to fly

You and me together
We can do anything
Baby you and me
Together yes yes
The two of us together
We can do anything baby
You and me together
Yes yes

We can always look back
At what we did
Always the memory of
You and me baby
But right now it’s you
And me forever girl
You know we can do
Better than anything that
We did you know that you
And me we can do anything

You and me together
We can do anything baby
You and me together
Yes yes
The two of us together …