Quarantine made me do it. Starting back in the fall, I found myself categorizing my music by theme. I compiled songs about leaving home, songs about love, songs about growing up. As the summer progressed, it became more specific: songs that included or consisted of spoken word over music, songs about rain, songs about birds, and songs about Greek and Roman mythological and historical figures. This eventually led me to songs about weekdays. The more I listened, the more I noticed similarities among the songs. What follows are my thoughts on each weekday and the songs that share its name. I will also put you on to my favorite song for each day of the week. I hope this absolutely useless information might make you smile. Perhaps listening to these songs will help you to remember what day of the week it is as we endure our stay-at-home lifestyles a bit longer. God knows, at times, I’ve forgotten.

Monday

Monday certainly gets a bad rap. Monday is the universal start of the workweek, and therefore often aligned with feelings of depression, exhaustion, or disappointment. Because the idea of Monday being a total drag is popular, there are some really nice songs with Monday in the title. Though I like The Bangles’ “Manic Monday”, Mitski’s emotionally cutting “Jobless Monday”, Fats Domino’s rocking “Blue Monday”, John Prine’s charming and sharp “Long Monday”, T-Bone Walker’s blues track “Call it Stormy Monday”, The Mamas and Papas’s intricate and melodic “Monday, Monday”, and Fleetwood Mac’s jamming “Monday Morning”, I find “Rainy Days and Mondays”, by the Carpenters to be the standout track. Karen Carpenter sings with gravity and sincerity, “What I feel has come and gone before / No need to talk it out (talk it out) / We know what it’s all about… Rainy days and Mondays always get me down.” No better voice than hers could convey these mournful lines about depression; cyclical and inevitable, just like the days of the week. Carpenter finds solace in the one she loves, singing, “Funny, but it seems I always wind up here with you / Nice to know somebody loves me / Funny, but it seems that it’s the only thing to do / Run and find the one who loves me.” This song is certainly a downer, but it also celebrates tender love and the powers of companionship against sadness. I hate to see Monday with such a sad, albeit beautiful, crop of songs, but it cannot be denied. A Monday song will likely include some doom and gloom.