I’m only a few weeks into senior year, yet something about the phrase “getting ready for graduation” is already beginning to rub me the wrong way. After all, as experience shows, the true rites of passage, the ones with the power to transform, inevitably catch us unprepared, unwilling, or both. Even when we choose our transitions, like coming out to our families at Thanksgiving dinner or telling our partners we would like to spend our lives with them, something within us screams “too soon, too soon, too soon!”
This is the dilemma of Funeral; although the album was inspired by the losses the band endured during the recoding process, the band seems reluctant to speak directly to their lived experience. Like a tense Thanksgiving dinner conversation, the album desperately tries to stay “up” in the warmth of childlike innocence and playful youthful rebellion, addressing death as a distant philosophical concept. Even in “Haiti,” Régine Chassagne lists the atrocities of the Duvalier regime with the detached and studied drama of a student reciting Hamlet.
In “In the Backseat,” the album’s closing track Chassigne initially attempts to construct yet another nostalgic portrait of childlike innocence over a pretty tinkling piano—“I like the peace in the back seat/I don’t have to drive/I don’t have to speak”— but her dreamlike murmurings are interrupted by the nightmare of loss. Initially masked by metaphor “My family tree is losing all its leaves,” death itself finally emerges in the second verse’s shockingly direct “Alice died in the night,” a reference to Chassagne’s mother.
Even though Chassagne finds herself compelled to say it, she isn’t ready. She retreats again to her passenger seat fantasy but finds it altered, ravaged. Again, she accepts that Alice has died, and this time even language is not enough to contain her emotion as she breaks off into a wordless howl: “I’ve been learning to drive, I’ve been learn—Oh, Oh!”
Losing our parents is the last and often the most difficult rite of passage on the road to adulthood. It finishes the process of separation that begins at birth. For the first time in our lives, we are completely independent and we must become our own protectors, our own moral authorities. Ultimately, Chassagne reacted to her mother’s passing by committing to pursue music as a profession. The loss sent her “crashing toward the drivers seat” of her own life. In her wordless howl, under the crushing weight of despair, we can just barely discern a note of triumph.
Previous track: Rebellion (Lies)
