I found an old voice memo on my phone a few months back of me at maybe seventeen talking about a guy I was dating in this small careful voice I didn’t even recognize. I sounded like someone apologizing for taking up space. I sounded sanded down. And the worst part is I remember being proud of that version of me back then – proud of how agreeable I’d gotten and how easy I was to keep around. It took me years to understand I hadn’t matured I’d just gone quiet enough to be tolerable to a person who liked me better with the volume off. I sat in my car and listened to that memo twice and felt something close to grief for a girl who technically still exists. So when Fanny Alexandra opens ‘Funeral (For The Girl I Was)’ with a fragile little confession before detonating it, I felt that recognition in my gut. This is a song about burying the self you had to kill to survive somebody, and it does not whisper about it for long.
The track opens deceptively soft with a few intimate ballad-like lines that lull you before the dark alt-rock chorus comes through and rips the floor out. Fanny sings “they dressed me up in silence said it fits you better now / Cut my name out of my mouth so I wouldn’t make a sound / All the mirrors got forgiving when I learned to look away / I was easier to love when I had nothing real to say” and damn that last line did something to me. Being easier to love because you’ve stopped saying anything true. The image of your name getting cut out of your own mouth so you’d stay quiet. That’s the whole architecture of self-erasure in four lines, and she delivers it in this close wounded voice that makes you lean in right before she starts screaming.
Advertisement
Then she names the lie everyone tells you while they shrink you. “You said you’re just growing baby / But growing shouldn’t feel like this / Like I’m shrinking in the corners / Of a life I didn’t pick.” The way “growing” gets weaponized here is so fucking sharp. We’ve all had someone reframe our disappearing as personal development, call it maturity when really you were just getting smaller to fit a space somebody else built for you. Growth that feels like shrinking isn’t growth. Fanny knows the difference and she’s done pretending she doesn’t.
The chorus is where the funeral gets loud. “Hold the flowers like a warning / I’m not who I was before / We don’t bury bodies darling / We bury what we can’t restore.” The flowers as a warning instead of a tribute. The idea that what you’re actually burying is everything that got broken past the point of fixing. And then she lands the title line, “This is not a fucking funeral / It’s a funeral for the girl I was,” and the contradiction in that is the whole song. She’s holding a service for a version of herself while insisting it’s not the sad ceremony it looks like. It’s rage in a black dress.
Quick aside. I have a friend who went through something similar with a long-term ex and when she finally got out she didn’t cry the way everyone expected – she got furious and started a band actually which felt aggressively on-brand. People kept waiting for her to fall apart and instead she got sharper and meaner and more herself than she’d been in years. Fanny’s song is for women in that exact phase, the part nobody warns you about where the grief comes out as fury and you stop being polite about what was taken from you.
The second verse digs into the part that really stings, how the person who erased you then has the audacity to miss the ghost. “I learned to laugh at nothing just to prove that I was fine / Got addicted to the feeling of erasing every line / You kept asking where she went like she left without a trace / But you loved me most in pieces easy to replace.” Getting addicted to your own erasure is such a brutal, honest thing to admit. And that closer about being loved most in pieces easy to replace? That’s the kind of line that makes you put the song on pause and stare at the wall for a second. Some people don’t want you whole. They want you manageable.
Advertisement
Then comes the bridge and this is where Fanny stops grieving and starts indicting. “You don’t get to say you miss her / Like you didn’t help her die / Like you didn’t turn her silence / Into something I survived.” She’s revoking his right to mourn the girl he helped kill and it’s the most cathartic damn moment on the track. The accusation lands clean. You don’t get to play sad about the disappearance you caused. Then she stacks it higher with “You call this healing I call it loss / You call me strong I call it cost / You say ‘you made it’ I say ‘barely’ / You loved her light but not what scared you,” every line a direct rebuttal to the comforting narrative everyone tells survivors. They call it strength, she calls it the bill she’s still paying.
Fanny Alexandra makes dark emotionally driven alternative music that lives in the territory of self-loss and the quiet violence of becoming someone you didn’t choose. Her songs run intimate and atmospheric – built around honest writing and a haunting vocal presence that feels less like a performance and more like she’s pulled you into a cinematic inner world and locked the door behind you. ‘Funeral (For The Girl I Was)’ moves between delicate alt-pop storytelling and raw alternative-rock intensity and the wounded closeness of her vocal is what makes the heavy chorus hit as hard as it does.
I never deleted that voice memo. I thought about it, but there’s something I needed about keeping the evidence of who I had to stop being. That girl in the careful little voice isn’t coming back and I’ve made my peace with it, but I don’t pretend she just naturally faded, because she didn’t. She got buried so the rest of me could keep going. Fanny ends her song with “It’s a funeral for the girl I was / You were there when she was fading out,” and that last line is the whole thing, the refusal to let anyone act innocent about the death they witnessed. Some funerals aren’t sad. Some of them are the loudest, angriest act of survival you’ve got, and you wear the black like armor instead of mourning.
