'Funny Man' by Zach Bryan - Lyrics & Meaning

After months of teasing, Zach Bryan's long-awaited The Great American Bar Scene has officially arrived, and with it, so has a handful of the artist's most profound work yet.

'Funny Man' is included in that distinction, the album's 17th track a thundering ballad about love, beauty and the sense of humor of the Man upstairs.

Opening with the scattered warble of distant steel, 'Funny Man' begins to unfold in a rumble of bass drum hits and cymbal crashes. The cloudy arrangement soon erupts with the chorus, becoming all racing rhythms and moaning strings. Shimmering keys occasionally join the mix, punctuating the ballad with a brilliant trill. It's a striking melody for an equally staggering tune in which ideas of time, love and God all collide.

"You know that time goes
Right out the window
And our hearts
They beat on borrowed time"

'Funny Man' opens with Bryan posing one universal truth: time is fleeting. Humans are only promised this moment and we're all living, working, loving, existing on a finite amount of time.

He sings that we should all live while we can and "pack the car while the creek's runnin' / Cast a line with the dawn comin'."

"Reckon God is a funny man
For puttin' beauty in these ugly hands
And I don't quite understand
The joke quite yet"

He ruminates on how this life holds so many uncertainties, intricacies and absolutes that only the creator of it all could be in on the joke, or that perhaps the artist himself is the punchline for getting to hold "beauty in these ugly hands."

In 'Funny Man', beauty is the creek, the ability to fish in it, the person beside him as he does. Beauty is the someone he gets to love, the "one piece in hot beach sand ... the shape you take when you sleep in."

He reckons, "God's gotta be a funny man, I do / 'Cause I got you."

"You know the time goes
Right out the window
And our hearts
They beat on borrowed time"

Again, he croons of time and the passing of it, perhaps more aware of how fast it moves when there's someone meaningful to share it with. That's why there's a sense of urgency as the song come to an end, a firm need to:

"So pack the car while the creek's runnin'
Cast a line with the dawn comin'
You know I wanna believe in somethin'
Somethin' like you"

When sharing the preface to The Great American Bar Scene ahead of its official release, Bryan explained some of the finer details of the album, writing: “The making of this album tested me and everyone close to me."

While he hasn't spoken specifically about 'Funny Man', he has explained how personal the record as a whole is to him.

"It drove me to my ends and my beginnings," he continues. "I saw the lights of Paris after saying I would for ten years, rode the coast of Australia with a beautiful woman, was locked in a pub until 7am in Ireland, walked my favorite street in New York over a hundred times, thought I was going to bleed out in a field in Tennessee, spent a few hours in handcuffs, hugged my grandma more than a few times, layed in the grass of my mother's hometown, sang ‘State Trooper’ in a bar South of Boston and wrote something that I think was important. I wrote and produced all of these with the help of some truly great friends. I finally felt like I's making music again. If you don't like it I assume it's not intended for you. Grab your beers through tears and fears, ‘the Great American Bar Scene’.”

You know that time goes
Right out the window
And our hearts
They beat on borrowed time

Pack the car while the creek's runnin'
Cast a line with the dawn comin'
You know I wanna believe in somethin'
Somethin' like you
Reckon God is a funny man
For puttin' beauty in these ugly hands
And I don't quite understand
The joke quite yet

And it was cold, but I was warmer than I'd ever been
I'll get old, but I wish I was younger then
I reckon God's gotta be a funny man, I do
'Cause I got you

One piece in hot beach sand
Make it through to the weekend
The shape you take when you sleep in
Reckon God is a funny man
For puttin' beauty in these ugly hands

And it was cold, but I was warmer than I've ever been
I get old, but I wish I was younger then
I reckon God's gotta be a funny man, I do
'Cause I got you

You know the time goes
Right out the window
And our hearts
They beat on borrowed time

So pack the car while the creek's runnin'
Cast a line with the dawn comin'
You know I wanna believe in somethin'
Somethin' like you

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