Lyrically Speaking: Exploring “paranoia” of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’
The Velvet Underground never really did standard love songs. They were much more concerned with subverting normality and creating their own artistic world. Anti-pop in every sense of the word, their debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico, was awash with themes of drug abuse, sadomasochism, and the seediness of the New York underground with which they were deeply ingrained – hardly a standard affair for a late 1960s rock record.
Perhaps the only song on the record that could be considered an easy ride is ‘Sunday Morning’, a seemingly idyllic account of weekend optimism. As with virtually everything written by Lou Reed, though, not all is as it seems.
Reportedly, the composition of ‘Sunday Morning’ came about after the record label releasing the band’s debut album altered the New Yorkers to the need for a single. The Velvet’s producer, Tom Wilson, later said, “You couldn’t put an album out without having a single. But there’s nothing on [The Velvet Underground & Nico] that could be a single.”
Admittedly, it is hard to disagree with him. To release something as daring and divisive as ‘Venus In Furs’ as a single would be commercial poison. Of course, the band were never particularly concerned with commercial success, so Reed went off and produced ‘Sunday Morning’, in order to appease the label’s need for a single.
The resulting track remains one of The Velvet Underground’s most widely known tracks, with its gentle breeze and tranquil atmosphere endearing the track towards audiences decades after the band first released it. However, the lyrical content of the song points to something much darker than a simple Sunday morning. If you scratch beneath the surface of the song, the seemingly pleasant music and a refreshingly melodic performance from Reed gives way to themes of drug-induced paranoia.
Reed’s heavy use of heroin permeated throughout the songwriting on the Velvet’s debut, most obviously on the first song of side B, appropriately titled ‘Heroin’. On ‘Sunday Morning’, its influence over the songwriting is much more subtle, focusing on the intense paranoia that drug addiction brings with it. Lines like “It’s just the wasted years so close behind” and “Watch out, the world’s behind you” speak to a tortured mental state, untrusting of the world around them.
Unsurprisingly, the catalyst for the track came from pop art progenitor Andy Warhol. The story goes that Reed was messing around with the guitar track but had no lyrics, but when Warhol suggested he make a seemingly upbeat, happy song about loneliness, isolation, and paranoia. Although, as with any story about the VU, this hypothesis is hard to prove or disprove, it certainly seems in-keeping with the work and personality of Warhol. Whatever the truth behind its composition, ‘Sunday Morning’ ended up being both the most commercially accessible song on the record, as well as one of the most complex in an emotional sense.
In addition to being among the most popular Velvet Underground tracks, ‘Sunday Morning’ also perfectly sets up the rest of The Velvet Underground & Nico. Hastily pasted into the tracklisting as the opening track for the seminal album, the track lulls the audience into a false sense of security before plunging them into the dark and seedy world of New York’s underground music scene.
