My Dad used to muse that Sundays in college, back when he was at BYU, were always the worst, because that purported “day of rest” left him with way too much time to think: “Will I ever get married? Will I ever have kids? Did I pick the right college? Did I pick the right major? Did I pick the right career? Will I even make it in my career? Is this the right path for me? Is this even the right religion for me? Is all I think I know a lie and my faith in vain? Will I die alone?” and etc.
Now, he spoke of all these existential dreads in the past tense, as old concerns long resolved. Nevertheless, as I went away to college which then stretched into grad school and then into even more grad school, I confess I came to learn what my Dad was talking about many times over. There is indeed a peculiar malaise associated with certain Sunday mornings, no matter how debauched or chaste or exciting or dull Saturday night may have been. And it’s a feeling certainly not unique to Mormonism (if anything…), at least as shown by the sheer provenance of songs about Sunday that have been produced over the decades. Indeed, I once sat down in grad school and (taking advantage of a luxury my Dad lacked even in the ’70s), made an extended playlist of all those Sunday songs, to play on all those Sunday mornings when the Tab choir just didn’t cut it.
It was anchored, naturally, by the Velvet Underground’s 1967 album-opener “Sunday Morning.”
I can’t have been the only person who, after years of hearing breathlessly from critics how revolutionary and radical and wild the Velvet Underground were, to at long last put on their first record–what Rolling Stone once called “the most prophetic album ever made”–only to hear it open with not some proto-punk noise-rock or whatever, but rather this disarmingly gentle little pop-ballad about, yes, the quiet malaise of a Sunday morning. The shock of that anti-climax was ironically more off-putting to me than even their most experimental drug anthems, and it took me months to warm up to it.
But warm up to it I did, which I did on those cold Sunday mornings when I awoke with “a restless feeling by my side.” Like Nico (in one of the only songs where she sounds human–probably because she sounds weary), it was “a feeling I don’t want to know,” but did. It’s a song about paranoia that you don’t have to be paranoid to understand. It’s the sort of feeling that helps you understand why they would also record a song about “Heroin” (which we’ve published about previously)–a song that also “tries for the kingdom,” that attempts to “feel just like Jesus’ son”–in the first place. Even if you’re a stone-cold atheist, sometimes Sunday morning is when you are most in need of anything resembling a religious experience–even the most self-destructive substitutes for one–if only to stave off the creeping existential dread a little longer.
The Velvet’s “Sunday Morning” also appears to be what influenced emo-mainstay Jimmy Eat World (which I don’t think gets near enough attention) on their 1999 homage, “A Sunday.”
Like the Velvets, “A Sunday” is a mid-tempo ballad centered on the malaise of, well , a Sunday; it opens with a gentle xylophone reminiscent of John Cale’s celesta on “Sunday Morning.” Like Lou Reed and Nico, frontman Jim Adkins is also clearly singing about the come down after an extended drug trip (“Learn as the drugs leave”). Yet also like my Dad, the song accurately identifies Sunday as a day of way too much introspection (“On a Sunday, I’ll think it through”), of when “the haze clears from your eyes,” of those (or what you think are) clear-eyed, sober, and somber realizations that “what you wish for won’t come true/live with that, with that.” (It’s a hell of a song to listen the morning after a failed date, I’ll tell you that).
There’s some tangential LDS connections via Jimmy Eat World: originating in the mini-Utah of Mesa, Arizona, the band had to replace their first bassist after he left to serve a mission (I heard all about that in the MTC back in the early-aughts), and purportedly once tongue-in-cheek dedicated their song “Futures” to “the angel Moroni” in concert. Not that the LDS connections are necessary, or even relevant (outside the purposes of connecting it to this site). But given the massive popularity of Jimmy Eat World among a certain subset of older LDS Millennials, it’s worth sometimes reflecting how much their music is influenced by the Mesa-milieu that informs them–of how much even a bunch of Word-of-Wisdom-keeping teens couild wake up on a Sunday with a feeling they don’t want to know, either. (Have we not all had those mornings where you need a cigarette and you don’t even smoke?)
Sometimes the only way through your depression is through it. Sometimes doubt, even self-doubt, can be a religious experience. Sometimes Sunday is a Holy day because you need to work through your malaise to feel whole again.
This concludes the first two tracks on my Sunday Morning playlist. I will, with your indulgence, be exploring the rest of them in the weeks to come.