The Funeral
Band of Horses Lyrics

The lyrics to Band of Horses’s song The Funeral are cryptic and contemplative, evoking a sense of longing and melancholy. The song starts with the line “I’m comin’ up only to hold you under”, which can be interpreted as the singer’s desire to be close to someone they care about or perhaps even to smother them, leading them to say “and comin’ up only to show you’re wrong”. The next line expresses the singer’s difficulty in understanding the person they are addressing- “to know you is hard, we wonder / to know you all wrong, we won”. It’s possible that this line is about the interpersonal struggles involved in getting to know someone closely.

The song shifts in tone in the second verse, with the apologetic line “Really too late to call, so we wait for / morning to wake you, is all we got”. The singer reveals that they themselves are hard to understand and that they are not the perfect person their admirer might have thought they were with the line “to know me as hardly golden / is to know me all wrong, they warn”. The chorus of the song repeats the lines “At every occasion, I’ll be ready for the funeral / once more, it’s called the funeral” which can be taken to mean that the singer is always ready for the inevitable end of a relationship, perhaps because they are someone who struggles to connect deeply with others.

Overall, the lyrics of The Funeral are introspective and moody, with a focus on the difficulties of intimacy and the inevitability of endings.