It sounds like an oasis of peace and serenity before the agitated, sometimes abrasive chaos that’s about to follow. Right at the start of a boundary-shattering debut album filled with speed, smack, and S&M, the Velvet Underground offer up something like a soft prayer, a gentle plea for quiet and calm following a night (and a life) of questionable choices. Moe Tucker’s drums tap lightly, the primary instrument — John Cale’s celeste, with its glassine ringing — is the very definition of delicate, and Lou Reed’s voice barely rises above a murmur.
The whole song is designed to soothe souls that desperately need soothing. The time it evokes is right there in the title: “Sunday Morning.” We’ve come to expect certain things of the music that captures the feeling of certain times of the week.
Monday morning is all about gritting your teeth to face the week ahead, Friday is about throwing off the shackles of work after reaching the weekend everybody’s been working for, and the recharged Saturday night is pop music’s night for fighting (however literally or metaphorically you choose to interpret that), knowing that there’s nowhere to be in the morning. And that “nowhere to be”? That’s Sunday morning. Some folks laze around the house doing nothing, some deal with the all-too inevitable consequences of the night before.
Some make waffles, some get lost in the newspaper (hi!), some dither in bed trying to decide what to do for the morning before realizing tha.
