I woke up with Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground stuck in my head today. It got me thinking about how that “Sunday” feeling is a universal thing people have been considering for a long time. Even the term “Sunday scaries” is starting to catch on in our vernacular.

I think a lot of us can relate, whether we’re anticipating the impending work week or in the other case, trying to encapsulate that lingering hangover + anxiety or as I like to call it “hang-xiety”.

Many songs have been written about it but I think the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning and Kris Kristofferson’s Sunday Morning Coming Down were on the same wavelength when it came to capturing that feeling.

There’s a lot of mutual recognition within the lyrics here:

“Sunday morning, brings the dawning
It’s just a restless feeling by my side
Early dawning, Sunday morning
It’s just the wasted years so close behind..”

It captures that quintessential Sunday wistfulness and paranoia, similarly found in Kristofferson’s Sunday coming down:

“Then I crossed the empty street
And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin’ chicken
And it took me back to somethin’
That I’d lost somehow, somewhere along the way..”

The Velvet Underground’s song is more stripped down lyrically in an iconic rock n’ roll kind of way and Kristofferson is more on the side of poetic in his songwriting as he describes the scene as walking the streets of Nashville the next morning after flying too high that previous Saturday night.

Regardless of the artist’s approach or musical genre, both songs succeed in their attempt to reflect a mood we can all connect to.

✨Happy Sunday✨