Steeped in girls-night-intimacy backdropped by sleepover conversation, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Such A Funny Way” is the lovechild of her passion for ABBA and the tongue-in-cheekness with which listeners are now so familiar. With sassy staccato verses and crashing choruses, this is an instant classic and a hit for the fans, a thank you for the ones who danced it out during the Man’s Best Friend era. Released initially only in certain vinyls, “Such A Funny Way” is at once hilarious and depressing. The singer has recently broken up, but delusionally bends over backwards to make his abandonment an expression of love: “Oh what a lovely sentiment, you said don’t contact me again.” This tragicomedy is the deluxe track of Man’s Best Friend, and lays out the familiar obsession with someone who is “forgetting [you] more everyday.” 

This is, at its heart, an homage with small moments of reinvention. The plucky instrumental certainly reminds one of ABBA (the changing tempo in an elongated “Myyy babyyy” is so ABBA), but I think what sets it apart is the vulnerability and coyness of the lyrics themselves. Carpenter is sitting on the floor with you, joking about her own naivety and singing into a hairbrush a la her SNL performance. Not to say she doesn’t call out to her passion for ABBA: the line “you know just how to thrill me, oh honey, how you kill me!” harkening to her performing covers on tour. The endlessly delusional hook, “You have such a funny way of sayin’ ‘I love you’”, laughs with us, and feels like secrets being told and jokes being written and rewritten—like adding to a bit with a friend so much that words lose meaning and ribs become sore. It really is so funny. 

There’s something in the rigour with which she admonishes this love interest, too—she’s humiliated by his sudden absence, with her “call[ing], but him “not replying”, and wants him to feel it as well. Where “Such A Funny Way” stands out, though, is in its understanding that she, too, is losing her mind. “If one of my phone calls would just go through,” she wonders, but doesn’t reconcile with her own questionable behaviours (one of her phone calls? Oh no…). Carpenter’s relatability is unwavering—haven’t we all thought those hours on delivered served a purpose? This is for those of you on hour 22 of waiting to hear back. They do have such a funny way of saying “I love you”! Have some faith! Carpenter certainly (and delusionally) does. 

The middle-eight is especially brutal, citing his alcoholism and comparing it to her demure domesticity. “Funny everybody knows something that I don’t,” she sings while shaking her head and tutting in disappointment, and there’s nothing in this song that indicates stability on her behalf. “So funny that I have to laugh, just so I don’t cry,” reveals what we’ve always known. She’s contradicting (and maybe displaying some growth from) sentiments like “Don’t smile because it happened, baby, cry because it’s over” on the album prior. The build up of this song to such a flowery release seeks to replicate that very feeling—when they do finally reply, with the typical one-word sentiment, does it actually feel like love? Or is it biding time so you avoid an inevitable breakdown. Hey, at least Carpenter eventually gains emotional sentience. When are you going to do the same?  

The ending repetition of “You have such a funny way” feels like a soothing prayer, a manifestation, a chant whilst being dragged away. It seems Carpenter is using this deluxe track to answer the question posed in her song “My Man on Willpower”: “What in the fucked-up romantic dark comedy is this nightmare, baby?” A “perfect” solution to the everlasting question. One wonders if maybe Carpenter is projecting her own hilarity on a mediocre man. One wonders if maybe we should all look inward, stop wasting time with imagined I love yous and instead only long to hear them outright within a reasonable reply window. Oh well. I’m sure Carpenter will answer this for me on the next album with that signature flirty wink and hilarity to side-step the heartbreak.