anonymous May 2nd, 2006 10:54AM  
This song is about living life to the fullest. "Eat drink and be merry for tomorrow will die." He is saying that you don't get any days back so live life. He also talks about drinking and doing some drugs along the way. "Dragons were smoked bumblebees were stinging us I was soon to be crazy." Basically enjoy every day because you won't get it back.

anonymous July 3rd, 2006 10:29PM  
I was told by someone that is song was about hillbillies tripping on acid, hence the name tripping billies.

anonymous September 4th, 2006 01:56PM  
"Eat drink and be merry
for tomorrow we die
eat drink and be merry
for tomorrow we die" is also what was commonly said by people during the black death.

anonymous December 10th, 2006 11:52PM  
Tripping Billies is slang for smoking marijuana

anonymous April 19th, 2007 12:37PM  
This song is about the best time that Dave ever had. He was back in Africa and it was the first time he had ever dropped acid, and the colors and sounds were so vibrant and he said it was the best moment in his life....the Billies come in because the people he was tripping with were police officers and in Africa police are called billies

anonymous November 7th, 2007 11:10PM  
Only one of these interpretations was correct. It's about Dave doing acid back in Africa and then he was talking to cops."Dragons were smoked/Bumblebees were stinging us", "Out on the beaches we wore/Pineapple grass bracelets". That would make absolutely no sense at all unless you were on acid.

anonymous February 15th, 2008 06:10PM  
Yes the last interpretation is the correct one and a Billy is what a cop is called in England and in some places in Africa the countries were at one time under British Authority. If I remember right I read something about Dave saying they were tripping on the beach naked. this could be wrong but I am about 85% sure that this last part is right also.

anonymous June 8th, 2008 11:58AM  
This song is about an early review of the band that they sounded like hillbillies tripping on acid when they played.

SunDevil1 October 28th, 2008 09:48PM  
Pretty sure this is about when the band did peyote on a beach somewhere. "My yellow flame she dances" is about the flame from the lighter blowing in the wind".

lookupattheskyxx January 23rd, 2009 02:41PM  
I believe, that even though everybody says this song is about Dave doing drugs in Africa, which probably is right, but I believe he got the motivation to do this song from John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which was written in 1689. In a sentence, John Locke wrote, "For if there be no Prospect beyond the Grave, the inference is certainly right, Let us eat and drink, les us enjoy what we delight in, for to morrow we shall die." In the song Tripping Billies, Dave goes, "Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we'll die." Therefore, if you read the Human Understanding essay, you can notice and sense more of what Dave had been motivated by when he wrote that phrase.

wvufan2122 June 20th, 2009 04:50PM  
He got the name back when he played the song for his girlfriend back in africa and she said that it sounded like Hillbillies tripping on acid and he got the name tripping billies. He just talked about this on his Road to Big Whiskey on the Fuse channel.

jimmy August 4th, 2009 10:44AM  
It's probably about all that hedonistic/nihilistic stuff. And "Eat and Drink; for Tomorrow We Die" is from I Cor. 15:32 which was taken from Isa. 22:13 (where Locke got it from).