Songfacts®:

• "FEEL." is a song that finds Kendrick Lamar meditating on his stardom as he catalogues the wide range of feelings, particularly the negative ones, that his fame and success has elicited. He shares his growing anxieties about losing his friends and family and disillusionment with "industry promises" and "false prophets."
• Kendrick makes it clear on the hook that he feel's nobody is looking out for him.
  
  Ain't nobody prayin' for me
  Ain't nobody prayin' for me
  Ain't nobody prayin' for me
  Ain't nobody prayin'
  
  Lamar builds off of the previous track "ELEMENT."'s "All my grandmas dead, so ain't nobody prayin' for me" lyric, turning it into a chorus.
• Top Dawg Entertainment in-house producer Sounwave produced the track and also helped Lamar write it. "Kendrick really trusts my ear," the beatmeister explained to Spin in 2015. "When you've been around somebody so much, you kind of understand what they like."
• Sounwave samples the drums from O.C. Smith's 1968 track "Stormy" to help enhance the mellow and gloomy production. He also uses melodic samples from Fleurie's 2016 song "Don't Let Me Down" and Loopmasters' royalty-free Organic Future Hip Hop sample pack.
• Chelsea Blythe, who is an A&R rep at Lamar's label Interscope, offers additional vocals at the beginning of the track.
• Bassist Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner, who played on much of To Pimp a Butterfly and Untitled Unmastered contributed bass to this track. In 2016, Thundercat won a Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration for his work on "These Walls."