It almost feels like cheating to put Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” on a playlist about feeling down on a Sunday morning–it’s just too on the nose.
I am Extremely Not A Country Fan (no, not even of sacred cows like Cash), so I’m always about to skip this track whenever it comes up on my Sunday Morning playlist, figuring I threw it on solely out of some misbegotten sense of obligation and completionism. But when you wake up in that very Sunday Morning Mood, all genre distinctions break down, and so I always end up listening to “Sunday Morning Coming Down” straight through anyways.
The ballad is a story-song about a man waking up Sunday morning hungover “with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt”, who drinks a beer for breakfast “and one more for desert,” then puts on his “cleanest dirty shirt” to go for a walk where everyone’s having a good day but him. He sees a Dad playing with his daughter (implying he’s estranged from his own children), smells someone’s frying chicken (implying he’s got nowhere to eat himself), and stops outside a Sunday school to listen to them sing (implying he feels unworthy to actually enter a Church). It is, as the kids say, Mood.
The mythology of Johnny Cash as the sinner with a heart of gold was firmly set in stone by the time of the track’s 1970 release, and so the song fit in with his public image to a T. Hence there’s always a mild shock to learn that he didn’t write it all; it’s a Kris Kristofferson ditty originally recorded by Ray Stevens. But (much like Aretha Franklin’s cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect”), the song is now so associated with Cash that it almost feels written for him. Certain songs just feel like Johnny Cash songs regardless of whether he wrote them or not (as Nine Inch Nails learned the hard way when they let Cash cover “Hurt“, only for him it to promptly make it his own–“like someone kissing your girlfriend” Trent Reznor said half-jokingly, but only half). (Incidentally, I can testify from personal experience that there are Gen Z college students right now who think “Hurt” is a Johnny Cash original–with no clue about the NIN version–which, wow, what a wild generation gap.)
When you write a Johnny Cash song, you should just pre-emptively give it to him and be done with it. That appears to be what U2 had in mind when they invited the Man in Black himself to sing on Zooropa‘s closing track “The Wanderer.”
The background is that in the early-90s, U2 had reinvented themselves from an arena-rock band to…well, still an arena-rock band, but with much more techno and electronica inflected sounds, and replacing their youthful earnestness with a sort of world-weary ironic detachment. (By way of example, their 1984 hit “Pride (In the Name of Love)” references Christ’s betrayal from the perspective of Martin Luther King Jr., while their 1991 track “Until the End of the World” narrates Christ’s betrayal from the perspective of Judas). 1991’s Achtung Baby had been a run-away success, and so 1993’s Zooropa was the follow-up that doubled-down on the studio-experimentation.
Although the Brian Eno-produced ambient-drone and fuzz-bass keep this song as far removed from Country as possible (thank goodness), “The Wanderer” is still unmistakably a Johnny Cash song, and even works within the same “Sunday Morning Coming Down” lineage: once again, a man goes out for a walk (“I went wanderin’”) with religion on his mind (“the word of God lay heavy on my heart”); once again, he stops outside a Church to listen; once again, he is estranged from his loved ones. But, in keeping with the whole end-of-the-Cold-War/end-of-history vibes of the early-90s, the setting is much more apocalyptic: he’s walking “under an atomic sky”, where the acid “rain it burns”, which in turn only remind him of “the tears when you said goodbye.”
The song exudes a real end-times vibe, which Christ himself prophesied will be a time “where the love of many shall wax cold,” (Matt. 24:12)—or, as Cash narrates, where “sons turn their fathers in,” “Where no one’s trusting no one,” where he must walk “with a Bible and a gun,” and where–like Abraham trying desperately to talk the Almighty out of destroying Sodom and Gomorrah–he is “Looking for one good man.” It’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” for the apocalypse; yet it is also an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the word for Revelation, for the song opens by already anticipating those celestial “streets paved with gold.”
Like Ben Folds in “Jesusland” (as we discussed last week), the singer can’t help but note that though the Church-goers “say they want the kingdom,” nevertheless “They don’t want God in it.” Yet though he despairs of finding even one good man to spare us from destruction, and though he also knows he is certainly a sinner himself–seeking, like a young St. Augustine, “To taste and to touch/And to feel as much, as a man can/Before he repents”–he still looks forward to salvation from the only source a sinner can: “Jesus, don’t you wait up/Jesus, I’ll be home soon…” It’s John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in postmodern form. He seeks Salvation not in this life but in the life to come. It is, once again, a perspective that takes for granted that we live in the Latter days (it’s always the last day for someone), and hence we should be behaving like Latter-day Saints.