When you get into those Sunday Morning moods, how do you snap out of it? Or at a bare minimum, how do you wrap up the playlist about it? For years, I finished my Sunday Morning playlist with The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” from their 1966 plea for artistic legitimacy Pet Sounds.

No less than Paul McCartney has ranked the track as one of his all-time favorites—and (as is obligatory to mention in every discussion of Pet Sounds) was instrumental in inspiring the Beatles to up their game and record Sgt. Pepper. My Dad once told me that at the time of the song’s release, “God Only Knows” was somewhat startling to Middle America, due to the willingness of a Top-40 Pop song to acknowledge the existence of the Almighty.

All that, coupled with the song’s California-sunshiny melody, swelling orchestra, and angelic harmonies, seemed to make “God Only Knows” a good note to end my Sunday Morning playlist on–as a way to finally break out of my moodiness and reconcile with the Lord.

As the years have passed, however, I’ve come to realize the subtle melancholy that is nevertheless still inhabiting “God Only Knows.” Most Beach Boys lyrics are of course superficial at best; there’s generally no coded messages, no hidden symbolism, no metaphysical conceits or what have you, just what you see is what you get—cars, surf, and girls. Here, however, the lyrical effect is much more ambiguous: although God is invoked by name, the Almighty nevertheless remains as opaque and inscrutable at the end of the song as he is at the beginning. “God only knows what I’d be without you,” Brian Wilson sings, but that’s really just another way of saying that such knowledge remains as fundamentally inaccessible as God Himself is.

Also, for such a sprightly song, lyrically it opens on a real down-note: “I may not always love you…” Usually, Pop songs are protestations of undying and eternal love–but here, to know whether true love will last is, again, as unknowable as God is. If this song is religious, then it is so in the old Calvinist vein, wherein your faith cannot tell you and God will not tell you whether you are saved or not.

Wilson also adds in verse 2, “If you should ever leave me/Though life would still go on, believe me/The world could show nothing to me/So what good would living do me.” Now, stating that life would go on if you dumped me is indeed a much healthier and saner approach to take towards love and break-ups–save that Wilson then immediately undercuts that healthy attitude with a suicidal shade of “So what good would living do me.” Saying that life would go on without you, but I wouldn’t, adds just a frightening touch of darkness to this otherwise light-hearted song.

I’m here reminded of all the Latter-day Saints I’ve known throughout the years who’ve similarly said, “I don’t know where I’d be without the Gospel in my life,” no doubt imagining days wasted in debauched bacchanals. Yet when I survey the roster of ex-Mormons, less-actives, friends of other faiths and straight-up atheists in my life, I’m forced to conclude that for the vast majority of folks, life without the gospel would look roughly the same as with it–maybe a little sadder, perhaps a little less self-assured, but it would still go on more or less like it always has. Brigham Young once said something to the effect that he distrusts anyone who says they’ll never leave the Church—he didn’t even say that, because he honestly didn’t know. No one knows. God only knows.

So the Beach Boys no longer finish out my Sunday Morning playlist, since “God Only Knows” gives no promise of a God that speaks (which, you’ll note, is kind of the whole raison d’etre of our faith). Rather, I now finish with a song that addresses the Almighty directly: Spacemen 3’s 1989 underground classic, “Lord Can You Hear Me.”

Coming at the end of an entire album’s worth of drugged-out psychedelia and studio-experimentation, “Lord, Can You Hear Me” is the splash of cold water, the quiet moment of clarity after the party, wherein you emerge from your haze, burnt-out, hungover, and weary–wherein you wonder, as ever, just what the hell you are even doing with your life–and all you can do is cry out from the depths of despair and loss, “Lord, can you hear me when I call?”

I keep waiting for this song to join “Hallelujah” as the most covered quasi-religious song on the planet (probably it’s in too low a register for any singing-show contestants to show off their pipes). Low, unsurprisingly, has a cover; as does some English outfit called the Underground Youth. So too does Spiritualized, Jason Pierce’s successor band after Spacemen 3’s 1991 break-up, wherein he brings a Phil Spector-ish Wall of Sound to the song. But nothing for me personally has quite matched the austere, stripped-down simplicity of the original; and while I normally find a pop-song fade-out to be a bit of a cop-out, it works thematically here in the Spacemen 3 version, since it implies the question is still hanging in the air there, still being asked even after the song ends–and is still awaiting response.

To be clear: I believe in God, and I believe that he answers prayers, and that he has answered mine in more ways than I can ever detail here. But still, but still, there are those Sunday mornings where I wake up and I honestly have to ask, from the depths of my depression and the bottom of my soul: Lord, can you hear me when I call?