“Funeral” — for people who feel guilty for feeling
- Donnut Moonyap
- Nov 5, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 17
!!! a small warning before you read: this post touches on depression, suicidal ideation, dissociation, death, and mental health struggles.
There’s something deeply unsettling about a song that understands you a little too well, and “Funeral” feels exactly like that. Phoebe Bridgers captures the strange loneliness of being alive–and the guilt that can come with feeling that way–so precisely that listening to it almost feels intrusive, like someone quietly reading thoughts you never said out loud. It’s heavy, intimate, and painfully self-aware.
Funeral
Artist: Phoebe Bridgers
Album: Stranger in the Alps
Year: 2017
Maybe that’s why this song hits so hard within the context of Stranger in the Alps. Phoebe was only 23 when the album was released. Yet, it captures the emotional chaos of being in your 20s with terrifying accuracy–the loneliness, the uncertainty, the existential reckoning that is at its most devastating in this record.
Verse 1 (excerpt)
And I have this dream where I'm screamin' underwater
While my friends are all waving from the shore
And I don't need you to tell me what that means
I don't believe in that stuff anymore
When I first heard this, it hit me hard because it captured that specific kind of sadness–the feeling of being alone in your suffering, and feeling as though your friends can’t really help you out of it. People see you and wave at you.. completely unaware of what’s going on inside you.
And then the next line rejects that superstitious belief to overanalyze dreams and search for meaning in them, which honestly hit me too, because I used to do that a lot. There was a phase in my life where I obsessed over every dream I had after my therapist told me that dreams can sometimes reflect thoughts we avoid during the day. So of course, my brain took that information and ran a marathon with it.
Chorus
Jesus Christ, I'm so blue all the time
And that's just how I feel
Always have and I always will
I always have and always will
As an eternal sad girl, I genuinely thought feeling constant sadness and emptiness was normal.. turns out it was not, and I ended up getting diagnosed with a bunch of things by my psychiatrist haha!
But jokes aside, this song really captures that feeling I carry all the time–that maybe this is just how things have always been, and maybe they’ll always stay this way. That exhausting feeling of sadness being both never-ending and ever-present.
Verse 2
I have a friend I call
When I've bored myself to tears
And we talk until we think we might just kill ourselves
But then we laugh until it disappears
I’ve always thought people who have someone they can call no matter what–when they’re happy, spiraling, numb, or just exhausted by life–are incredibly lucky. Someone you can cry to for hours until by the end, you’re both laughing so hard that either the sadness temporarily disappeared.. or you’re just laughing through it together.
And I think that’s what makes connections like that so important, especially during moments when your own mind starts turning on you.
Verse 2 (cont’d)
And last night, I blacked out in my car
And I woke up in my childhood bed
Wishing I was someone else, feeling sorry for myself
When I remembered someone's kid is dead
Very relatable–that feeling of blacking out, dissociating, and mentally checking out from everything around you for a second lol.
But I think that’s what makes this so painfully honest. It feels like a direct look inside the mind of someone struggling with depression–that constant guilt for feeling this shitty when “someone’s kid is dead,” when someone else out there is going through something worse than you.
It also doesn’t help that there’s a societal mindset that whenever you’re struggling, “other people have it worse,” which makes you shrink your own emotions because others are having a harder time.
Favorite !
And it's 4AM again
And I'm doing nothing
Again
With all that said above, the outro is my favorite part because Phoebe starts the song grappling with death, by acknowledging that she knows she doesn’t have all the time in the world–she could die tomorrow, just like the “kid a year older” than her. But even that realization isn’t enough to pull her out of her depression to actually do something.
And it ends up sitting in that uncomfortable space–feeling guilty for feeling the way you feel, but still acknowledging your sadness and knowing you have your people. But then it’s 4 a.m. again.. and you’re back in that same headspace.. doing nothing.. again. It’s that cycle. That scary, exhausting cycle that I know all too well.
Discovered this song when I had my boygenius obsession and started exploring their solo music the past few months. It kind of opened the door to a deeper appreciation for each of their individual writing styles, outside of the trio. I love my indie boys so much!
“Funeral” sounds phenomenal, yes. But I just can’t stress enough how it perfectly mirrors that feeling of overwhelming sadness followed by a wave of numbness, guilt, and quiet grief that a lot of people experience during depression.
Listening to this when I was DEEP into depression (but am I really out of the woods yet? jk!) was honestly a cathartic experience. I can’t tell you how many times I’d put the song on full volume, lie on the floor, and let that distorted guitar fade into the quieter body of the track, and just sing my heart out.
In a way, “Funeral” stayed with me beyond that period–not as something that keeps me in that space, but as something that understood it when I was in it. I think that’s what makes music like this so important: it doesn’t fix anything, it just sits with you when things feel too heavy to explain. And if anything, I hope it reminds me–and anyone reading–that even the quietest, most overwhelming feelings eventually shift, even if it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.
It does get better.. a little bit : )
D.
Stream it here: SPOTIFY I APPLE MUSIC I YOUTUBE
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