Funeral — Where Are You Going? Can I Come?

The song called “Funeral” ends with the last words of a man who killed himself.

Not a quote of them. The actual recording.

The outro of Mac’s “Funeral” — “Where are you goin’? / Where are you headed? / Where are you goin’? / Can I come? Can I come?” — is a sample of Hunter S. Thompson, taken from his appearance on The Charlie Rose Show. The line “Where are you going? Can I come?” is widely reported as the phrase Thompson spoke to his wife on the phone shortly before he shot himself on February 20, 2005. Mac Miller, 22 years old, recording the mixtape that would be called Faces in the rented Studio City house he was using to disappear into, ended a song titled Funeral with the last words of a suicide.

That isn’t mood lighting. That’s the entire argument of the song, placed at the end so you have to listen to everything that comes before it through a different ear.

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The trilogy, and where this song sits inside it

Tracks 10, 11, and 12 of Faces are Happy Birthday, Wedding, Funeral. The three biggest events in a life: birth, union, death. Mac sequences them in the middle of a 24-track mixtape — not at the end, where you’d expect a death song to live, but in the gut. After Funeral there are still twelve more tracks. The funeral isn’t the end. It’s the midpoint. The album keeps walking afterward.

That sequencing is the first thing to notice. Faces is not a death-bed mixtape with a death-bed ending. It’s a death-bed mixtape that puts the death in the middle and then keeps recording. Whatever this song is, it isn’t a finale. It’s a station the album stops at and then leaves.

What Mac controls and what he doesn’t

The opening of Funeral is a producer at work. “Yeah, yeah, can you turn up my headphones? / Yeah, yeah, yeah, ahem / This music go with my funeral, yeah, yeah.” He’s in the booth. He’s asking the engineer behind the glass for more level in his cans. The engineer behind the glass is also him — Mac produced this himself, credited as Larry Fisherman alongside ID Labs and E. Dan. He’s curating the music for his own funeral while sitting in the room where he made the music.

He has total authorial control of the funeral. He writes the script. He chooses the soundtrack. He directs the room.

By the end of the song, he doesn’t have a voice anymore. The voice at the end is Hunter S. Thompson’s. The funeral planner has been replaced by a sample of a dead man asking where everyone is going.

That dissolution — from booth-bound author to absent narrator whose ghost is using somebody else’s words to ask one last question — is the song’s whole motion.

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Verse one: the inventory

The first verse runs through the standard catalogue of someone trying to be ashamed of himself. Sins he’s praying the Lord forgive. Drugs as a war with boredom. A side-bitch he describes by her body. Abortions he says he forced. A child he might orphan on tour. Sitting at home drinking alone with his thoughts harassing him. By the count of the verse, it’s a checklist of self-loathing built out of rap conventions — the kind of inventory that a 22-year-old white kid from Pittsburgh has every reason to suspect sounds inauthentic.

Mac knows this. The verse keeps undercutting its own performance with one detail that breaks the convention:

My bicycle fell, I hit the road, the mailman almost hit me.

That’s not the next line in a rap. That’s a kid’s memory. A child’s near-miss. It sits on top of the gritty-city framing like a different photograph entirely. The verse is staging a funeral for a tough guy, and a six-year-old keeps showing up in the slideshow.

Then this line, which I keep coming back to:

I’m more than what I think of myself, I really have to be.

That’s not a flex. That’s not even a hopeful claim. The have to be is doing all the work. It isn’t I am more. It’s I am more, or else. The next hour doesn’t survive if I’m not. The line is a person trying to talk themselves into living another verse.

And then he closes the section with the line that’s the whole album in miniature:

A shame that my tragedy my masterpiece.

The verb is missing. Is? Became? Will become? He won’t say. He can’t say. Because the verb decides which way the argument runs — whether the suffering produced the art, or whether the art is just suffering with prettier lighting. The line refuses to commit and refuses to resolve. That refusal is the thesis of Faces as a body of work. He can’t tell what he’s making from what he’s living inside.

The chorus, mis-heard

This the last day of my life / Party like it’s the last day of your life.

The first time through, it scans as a banger hook. Carpe diem with a heavy bass kick. Last-day-on-earth energy. You can imagine the function it gets played at. You can imagine someone bouncing in their car.

But look at what the pronoun does. The my in the first half becomes your in the second. He’s not saying everyone should party because everyone is dying. He’s saying I am dying, and the way you can honor that is to party like you are too. He’s pulling the room into his condition. The chorus is the speaker requesting company for a death only he is experiencing. The “your” is everyone he wants there.

By the second time the chorus arrives, that read isn’t optional anymore. It’s the only one. And what sounded like a club hook the first time sounds like an invitation the second.

This is the song’s first quiet violence — the chorus you keep humming is the funeral invitation.

Verse two: where the language comes apart

The first verse was inventory. The second verse is the part where the inventory stops mattering.

See, we swallowed in this web of lies, never try to exercise.

The grammar starts skidding. Swallowed should be swallowed up; the preposition is gone, and what’s left is a sentence that runs into a wall. The line keeps doing this — words that don’t quite fit, phrases that almost rhyme themselves to death. The verse is built out of broken pieces.

Forever I melt and float away like waves in the ocean.

Water shows up. We’ll come back to that.

Starin’ inside of Heaven’s eyes, the gates will never open.

He’s looking. He’s at the gate. The gate doesn’t open. The cosmology of the song is plain: the speaker is outside paradise and outside paradise is where he stays. Not damned, exactly. Excluded. The gates aren’t slammed. They just don’t open.

I keep gettin’ hotter but all I seem to feel is cold.

This line is doing thermodynamic work. Hotter is the temperature the market reads on him — the rapper’s career heating up, the visibility climbing, the demand intensifying. Cold is what his body actually registers. The external system and the internal system have become uncoupled. He has stopped being able to feel his own success.

The cold/hot split is one of the most precise descriptions of dissociation I’ve heard on a rap record. The success doesn’t penetrate. The temperature outside doesn’t translate inside. He is publicly thermal and privately frozen.

Twenty-two don’t feel so old, but I think I’m eighty-two.

He gives you the age. Faces came out in May 2014; he was 22. The line is the literal report from the body: a 22-year-old who feels like he is rounding the corner on eighty. That is not how 22-year-olds usually describe themselves. That is how someone who has spent four years on drugs that take time off your life describes themselves.

You mean to tell me God took seven days and all he made was you?

It scans as a diss. It functions as a theological complaint. If a creator took a whole week and the result was this — a kid who feels 82, a kid who’s been close enough to death to soundtrack his own funeral — then either creation is poorly made or there is no creator doing the making. He’s not putting the addressee down. He’s putting the cosmos on trial and the line just happens to be aimed at a person standing in for it.

Then the song does the move it’s been building toward and then refuses to land it.

Bitch, check out the butterfly.

He points to the symbol. Look. The thing that’s been buried under the surface of the verse — metamorphosis, transformation, the death that becomes something else — surfaces in a single line. The butterfly is the oldest image we have for death as a doorway, not a wall.

He holds it for one line. Then:

If you the truth, then what the fuck am I?

The butterfly doesn’t survive the question. The transcendence gesture aborts the moment it’s made. He gestures at the metamorphosis and immediately undoes it by demanding the symbol prove itself. The verse reaches for the door and slams it shut from the inside. There is no transformation in this song. There is the gesture of transformation, which dies in one bar.

It’s the most honest move on the track. He’s saying: I know the symbol. I can’t access it.

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What the sample does

So we get to the outro. The chorus has played its last invitation. Mac’s voice is gone. And then:

Where are you going? / Where are you headed? / Where are you going? / Can I come? Can I come?

Thompson’s voice. Slurred, fragile, asking a question. The voice of a man who, by the time Mac builds this song, has been dead nine years. The voice of a man whose last act, when this sample is taken, was to ask exactly this question on the phone and then end his life.

Three things happen when you place that sample where Mac placed it.

First, it retroactively rewrites the chorus. Party like it’s the last day of your life sounded like a command. After the Thompson sample, you hear that it was never a command. It was always a question disguised as one. Can I come? — to the party, to the death, to wherever you’re going — is what the chorus was asking the whole time, dressed up in a hook so the question wouldn’t sound like a question. Mac built a song where the entire thing reframes once you hear the last forty seconds. The chorus, heard backward through the outro, reveals what it always was: I’m not throwing the party. I’m asking if I can come to yours.

Second, it ends the song by handing the microphone to a dead man. The funeral planner who opened the song asking for more headphone level has, by the end, ceded the recording to someone who can’t be in the room. The producer is gone. The voice is borrowed. The booth is empty.

Third — and this is the one that takes me a minute to say — it places the song inside a specific lineage. Thompson was the patron saint of doing damage to yourself in the name of the work. He turned drug-and-alcohol immersion into a literary methodology and held that posture publicly for forty years. When that posture finally broke, what came out of him last was a small, almost childlike question. Where are you going? Can I come? Mac Miller, four months out from his own DUI arrest, deep into the period that everyone around him would later describe as the worst stretch of his life, ends a song called Funeral with the question Thompson asked at the end.

I am not saying he was using Thompson’s words to announce something about himself. He didn’t die for another four years, and when he did the cause was different. I’m saying he was using Thompson’s words because Thompson’s words made the question say-able. The question was: I am tired of being here. Can I come with you? And he could say it by letting somebody else say it for him.

That’s what the sample is. Permission to ask the question without owning it.

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What the music is doing while this is happening

Larry Fisherman and ID Labs produced this together. E. Dan is the engineer-producer at ID Labs in Pittsburgh; Larry Fisherman is Mac. The credit itself is the doubled-self motif of Mac’s whole production catalogue — Mac alongside Mac under a different name.

The instrumental is anchored in an organ-like keyboard pattern that does church without saying church. There’s a low end that walks. There’s no triumphant build. The track doesn’t lift through the chorus the way a pop record would; the chorus arrives at almost the same dynamic level as the verse. The percussion stays restrained. The energy never converts to release.

This is the production decision that lets the song work. If the chorus had lifted — if Larry had let the drums break, let the keys swell, let the hook party the way the lyrics describe — the irony would have been a joke. Last day of your life over a banger is the kind of contradiction that turns into camp. By keeping the music subdued and a little dim, Mac lets the chorus stay sincere. The party is real, and it’s quiet, and it’s lit from the side. It feels like a wake more than a function.

The other thing the production does is leave space for the Thompson sample at the end. The outro doesn’t fight the recording — it gives Thompson the floor. The keyboard pad backs off; the rhythm thins; the engineer in Mac (Mac) clears the room so the dead man can ask his question.

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The water under everything

Twice in the second verse, water:

Forever I melt and float away like waves in the ocean.

I’m not awake, I’m in a lake, I’ll swim away with you.

Water is the catalog’s longest-running motif. Knock Knock (K.I.D.S., 2010) opened the file with water as flex — “in deeper than the water Michael Phelps was in,” a kid’s-imagination scale image used as a boast. By 2018 the album would be called Swimming. The arc between those two points is where you can hear Mac changing what water is for.

Funeral is one of the load-bearing stops on that arc. In Knock Knock, water is depth as bragging. In Stoned (Balloonerism, recorded the same year as this) water is shallow and murky — too shallow to drown, too dirty to see through. In Nosy Neighbor (Maclib leaks, 2015–17), water is the thing you live next to and refuse to enter. In Swimming, water is the medium you have to enter to survive.

Funeral sits inside that arc as the version where water is what you melt into. Not a flex. Not a fear. Not a refusal. A solvent. Forever I melt and float away like waves in the ocean. The body dissolving into the medium. I’m not awake, I’m in a lake, I’ll swim away with you. The first-person speaker becoming aquatic in real time.

That second line is wild for one reason: swim away with you. He’s not drowning. He’s not floating. He’s swimming. With somebody. The water has another person in it. And the you is unspecified.

Four years later, the album called Swimming would frame the verb as the project of staying alive. You have to swim. You can’t just float. You can’t just stay out. In 2014, the verb shows up here — I’ll swim away with you — bound up with a you who might be addiction, might be death, might be the dead man whose voice is about to close the song.

The line is the seam. The kid who bragged about Michael Phelps in 2010 has, by 2014, become a kid who is in the water with someone who isn’t named, on his way somewhere he isn’t naming, swimming.

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Cross-references

This song talks to several others in the tracked catalog.

• Apparition (Faces, also produced by Mac) — the ghost-version of the same speaker. Apparition is the verse where he’s already faded. Funeral is the verse where he’s planning the soundtrack. Both songs are coming from a body that doesn’t quite think it’s there.
• Diablo (Faces, earlier in the mixtape) — the Coltrane/Ellington sample on Diablo is the album’s first jazz-funk import. Funeral’s Hunter S. Thompson sample is the album’s most direct text import. Both are Mac borrowing somebody else’s voice to say what he can’t say in his own.
• Stoned (Balloonerism) — recorded around the same period, sister-album to Faces. Stoned’s shallow-water image is the inverse of Funeral’s melt-into-ocean image. Same speaker, two different positions in the same body of water.
• Knock Knock (K.I.D.S.) — where the water motif begins, as a kid’s flex. Funeral shows you what the same image looks like four years later, after the depth stopped being a metaphor.
• Jet Fuel (Swimming) — the cape-flight motif’s terminal version: head back to the ground, dear. Funeral’s outro is the request that Jet Fuel’s coda will eventually answer. Can I come? is the question. Head back to the ground is the answer he gives himself four years later.
• Hands (Circles) — the late-album admission that nobody’s coming. Funeral is the early version where he’s still asking.

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What the song is doing

Here’s what I think Funeral is doing, if I have to say it in one sentence:

Funeral is Mac asking, through someone else’s voice, if he can follow wherever the people he’s lost are going.

The first verse is the autopsy of the body that’s asking. The chorus is the invitation dressed up as a command. The second verse is the body coming apart in language. The outro is the question.

The question can’t be asked in his own voice. He’s not ready to. He may not even know he’s the one asking. But the song he’s built around the question is a structure that lets the question be asked — by handing the microphone at the end to a man who already asked it himself, into a phone, before pulling a trigger.

That’s why the song is called Funeral and not Death. A funeral is the ceremony the living have for the dead. Mac is composing the ceremony for himself, sitting in the producer’s chair, while still alive. The whole song is the program. The Thompson sample is the eulogy. The eulogy is a question.

The cruelty of Faces is that the answer never comes. Track 13 starts. The album keeps going. He keeps going. Twelve more songs. Four more years. Swimming. Circles. A different ending entirely. But Funeral doesn’t know that, and the song stays where it is — a 22-year-old in Studio City, asking through a dead man’s voice if he can come.

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Motif Tracker (Explication #67)

Motif	Appearance	Notes
Last words / final-message sample	Hunter S. Thompson outro: “Where are you going? Can I come?”	New motif. A sample whose source is widely reported as the last words of a suicide. Mac borrowing someone’s actual last question to ask his own. Watch for other instances of Mac handing the mic to a dead or absent voice — Bill Murray in What Do You Do, Coltrane/Ellington in Diablo. The Thompson outro is the most direct instance of the borrowed-voice move.
Water (melt / lake variant)	“Forever I melt and float away like waves in the ocean / I’m not awake, I’m in a lake, I’ll swim away with you”	Water becomes solvent — body dissolving into medium. New point on the catalog arc between Knock Knock (flex depth), Stoned (shallow/murky), Nosy Neighbor (live-next-to/refuse), and Swimming (immersion). The “swim away with you” variant — water with a companion — is the seam where the motif starts to become the project.
Larry Fisherman as doubled-self producer	Self-credit alongside ID Labs / E. Dan	Mac watching Mac, producing his own funeral music while sitting in the engineer’s chair. Same doubled-self frame as Now That You Hear (“see Mr. Fisherman”) and the alias use across Diablo, What Do You Do, 55.
Heaven’s gate / cosmic exclusion	“Starin’ inside of Heaven’s eyes, the gates will never open”	New motif. Not damnation. Exclusion. The gate doesn’t slam — it just refuses to open. Watch for this in Apparition and any track where Mac approaches the threshold and doesn’t cross.
Tragedy-as-masterpiece (no copula)	“A shame that my tragedy my masterpiece”	New motif. The missing verb is the song. He won’t commit to whether the suffering produced the art or whether the art is just suffering with framing. The grammar refuses to choose. Watch for this argument re-engaging in Swimming-era tracks where Mac directly asks whether the work is helping or feeding the wound.
Cold-while-hot dissociation	“I keep gettin’ hotter but all I seem to feel is cold”	New motif. The market reads heat; the body registers cold. Career success uncoupled from internal sensation. Watch for return in Time Flies, Jet Fuel, and Swimming-era tracks where the speaker reports temperature mismatches between his life and his career.
Aborted transcendence (the butterfly)	“Bitch, check out the butterfly / If you the truth, then what the fuck am I?”	New motif. Symbol of metamorphosis pointed at, then immediately demanded to prove itself, then dies in the same bar. The gesture of transformation without the access to it. Compare to Apparition’s ghost stuck mid-transition.
Age-marker / “twenty-two feels eighty-two”	“Twenty-two don’t feel so old, but I think I’m eighty-two”	Mac stating his age in the lyric — Faces released May 2014, Mac was 22. Watch for explicit age markers across the catalog — they tend to land in songs where the body has stopped feeling its calendar age.

Open QuestionThe trilogy is Happy Birthday → Wedding → Funeral, birth-union-death, three life events in a row. But Funeral isn’t the last track. The mixtape keeps going for twelve more songs after it. Why does Mac put the death song in the middle and then keep recording? Is the rest of Faces an afterlife — what comes after the funeral, where the speaker is officially gone but somehow still on the mic? Or is Funeral a fake-out, a rehearsal, a song the speaker stages so he can keep going by pretending he already buried himself? The mixtape itself doesn’t answer. But the position of the song — middle, not end — is one of the deliberate choices on Faces, and the choice is louder than the lyric. If the song is the funeral and the mixtape continues, then everything that comes after is a recording from someone who has decided he is already dead. That’s a hell of a frame for the back half of an album.