Wake up Already: 4 Magnificent “Morning” Songs

Wake up, everybody. We’re here with another list of songs, and we’re focusing on those with the word “morning” in the title. You might think that songs of that ilk would be hopeful with the promise of a new day.

Well, the four that we picked out aren’t quite that optimistic. Nonetheless, they give us a great glimpse of outstanding songwriters and artists at work, elucidating wake-up time.

“Good Morning Good Morning” by The Beatles

The Beatles spent most of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band addressing the everyday routine. These were small slices of life that seemed far removed from the rock-star excess. They then took those stories and threw music behind them that was thrilling, trippy, and downright groundbreaking. “Good Morning Good Morning” uses the typical greeting one gives during the early hours as a hard-charging refrain. Throughout the song, John Lennon’s narrator tries to find something within his daily activity that doesn’t make it seem like he’s living through his own personal Groundhog Day scenario. It’s a thrilling musical track filled with lyrical ennui.

“Angel Of The Morning” by Merrilee Rush

Chip Taylor might win the title for the person whose two most well-known songs were as far apart from each other in tone and content as humanly possible. It was Taylor who penned “Wild Thing”, a simplistic yet ridiculously catchy banger that The Troggs took to the garage-rock pantheon. A few years later, he came back with “Angel Of The Morning”, a delicate, aching track sung to the hilt by Merrilee Rush in the most famous (and, for our money, best) version of it. In the lyrics, the morning brings a wake-up call in more ways than one for the narrator. She knows that the magic of her short-lived love affair will have faded into cold reality by then.

“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” by Kris Kristofferson

The list of sterling artists who have covered this song over the years is quite impressive. But there’s something simple and touching about Kristofferson’s own woebegone version of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” that takes the cake. One of the amazing feats that a gifted songwriter can accomplish is taking a situation that seems very lived-in and authentic and making it make sense to someone who might not have been in those exact shoes but still knows the feeling. And it’s safe to say that most people have had moments in their lives when everything seems turned against them. That’s what “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” evokes so brilliantly. And that’s why we had to include it here, even though Kristofferson elided the “g” from “morning” in the title.

“Meet Me In The Morning” by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan could have popped up on this list with several different songs. There’s “As I Went Out One Morning”, one of the somewhat impenetrable parables found on his John Wesley Harding album. Or you could have picked “New Morning”, the title track to the 1970 album that attempted to wash away the bad taste of the Self Portrait project. But we’re going with “Meet Me In The Morning”, which comes from Blood On The Tracks, perhaps his greatest artistic triumph. It’s the purest blues song on the album (and what would a Dylan album be without such a track)? And it features some of his most potent vocals. His howl makes it fair to wonder if his significant other did indeed meet him at “56th and Wabasha.”

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