Thus far we’ve spent the bulk of our time discussing that Sunday morning feeling–the one you sometimes get in the harsh light of the dawn of a new week–but now it’s time to shift our attention to Sunday afternoon. By then, you have (depending on your background and/or religious upbringing) sobered up, or come home from Church, or turned on the game, or gone golfing, or went for a jog, or done yard work, or simply started to prep for school or work or whatever else you got comin’ up Monday. You begin to regret less your current life trajectory than simply the imminent end of the weekend. But though that Sunday morning mood recedes in your consciousness, it doesn’t disappear entirely; and as ever, there are songs that express this feeling.

First and perhaps most famously is Simon & Garfunkel’s 1968 classic “Mrs. Robinson.”

With a sort of winking insouciance, this pair of unassuming young Jewish boys from Queens reassure the titular Mrs. Robinson that “Jesus loves you more than you will know.” As the verses progress, it becomes increasingly clear that such is not a mere platitude, nor is it sarcastic, that Mrs. Robinson really does need these heavenly reassurances: the various verses make reference to her quiet Cold War paranoia (“we’d like to know a little bit about you for our files”), to some sort of hushed-up affairs (and that’s even without making reference to the song’s inseparable connection to The Graduate), and to a lost American innocence represented by Joe DiMaggio (though the idea that America ever had an innocence to lose in the first place is probably the one completely false note in the song).

Verse 3’s opener of “Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon” is the relevant lyric for us here. After passing through the two previous verses of paranoia and regret, Mrs. Robinson appears to have pulled herself together enough to attend “the candidate’s debate.” (Given that the song’s working title was “Mrs. Roosevelt,” this reference to politics feels especially apropos). Yet when it comes time to vote, she still has that crestfallen realization that “Every way you look at this you lose.” Is the vague “this” here referring to an election wherein both candidates seem equally undesirable, or to the hushed up affair of the previous verse, or her larger religious doubts, or to just all of life and the inexorable march of time in general, or all or none of the above? It ultimately doesn’t matter, of course; it’s the feeling of being in a no-win scenario that supersedes all other considerations. And even if you have absolutely no association with or interest in the polite upper-crust society that Mrs. Robinson is clearly navigating, you still can’t help but resonate with her Sunday afternoon mood that has not quite erased the concerns of Sunday morning.

But you don’t have to wait 3 verses to hear about Sunday afternoon on the Stone Temple Pilots’ 1994 hit “Interstate Love Song,” which features the mood strong right out the gate.

Whereas the infidelities of Mrs. Robinson were only hinted at and hushed-up on the Simon & Garfunkel, they are called out directly and openly by the Pilots’ Scott Weiland. “Waiting/On a Sunday afternoon/For what I read between the lines/Your lies,” he belts out. The song is yet another in a long lineage of Sunday heartache songs (as we’ve catalogued before). Yet though these accusations of “lies” are much more blunt on “Interstate Love Song” than on “Mrs. Robinson” (no one will ever accuse the Pilots of the same poetic pretensions as Paul Simon), the lyrics are also largely beside the point: that monster grunge riff, played in a strangely triumphant major key, is the real raison d’etre of the song. You blast this song not to indulge in the melancholy of Sunday afternoon, but to blot it out, so that you can enjoy the last few hours of the weekend while you still can.

On a personal note, I’m a touch too young to have gotten into STP during their ’90s hey-day, or to have lived through all those accusations that they were just a Pearl Jam rip-off (back when either band was big enough for that to matter). No, I actually didn’t get into them at all until long, long after such concerns had passed, in the late-2000s, when I was regrettably working as a technician for a Summer Sales outfit in Denver, CO (as I’ve published about previously). The flagrant dishonesty of the sales-reps was depressing enough; but to also realize that they were heavily recruited from among RMs at the BYUs–and to see so many of them not only gleefully sign-up, but then have the nerve to “keep the Sabbath day holy” while they were dishonest in all their dealings with their fellow man the whole rest of the week–was downright dispiriting. (I awoke in a Sunday Morning mood pretty much every Sunday that Summer). It was a real-life Alma 31:23 in the most disgracefully obvious way possible. And when my fellow technicians (who were overwhelmingly not LDS) got black-out drunk every Saturday night and confided to me that if it weren’t me, they’d assume all Mormons were crooks, I didn’t have a single thing to say in response.

I certainly understood why they drank so heavily; it’s the same reason why I started blasting Stone Temple Pilots down the Colorado interstate at the end of each work-day–I needed something big, loud, and dumb to drown out the damage to my soul, and in STP that suddenly became a feature, not a bug. I suppose it’s a testament to how meaningful I find my current job that I haven’t felt the need to listen to STP in years.

Except for “Interstate Love Song,” which remains firmly ensconced on my Sunday Morning playlist–both as a reminder of those who do still need loud, dumb rock, and for why I committed myself to never again work a job solely for the money again. In a perverse sort of way, that Summer sales experience was faith-promoting, because it helped me realize that I really do have an immortal soul–largely due to how much of it I could feel getting killed off each day. I learned that Summer how literally Christ meant it when he said, “What doth it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul.” And most of us don’t even get the whole world out of the deal, but just a few thousand bucks. “The worth of souls is great” (D&C18:10) we like to declare; may we also start to rate our own souls a little higher from now on.