A few years back, I found myself drawn to soul music, a genre I hadn’t spent much time exploring before. This is probably off the back of an exploration into instrumental funk while Mr F and I created our collaborative playlist, Funky Ass. ‘Morning in America is the first track on 2019’s American Love Call, and when you read the lyrics for this song, you can see how it fits with the theme.
I find myself drawn to drum sounds quite a lot these days, and this song starts with some seriously crisp drums (love that snare!), before the guitar and piano kick in with a smooth riff. Durand Jones’s slightly raspy vocal begins soon after, and you can hear a tinge of sadness:
It’s still in San Diego
You can hear a baby cryin’
As the trains in New York City
Roll thunder down the lineThe teachers rise in Richmond
As they sleep in San Antone
While the harbor lights on Baltimore
Got nurses headed home
It paints a picture of modern America in the early hours. It feels timeless; this could have been written in the 1900s as much as 2019. The verse sets up the chorus quite nicely, where “It’s morning in America, but I can’t see the dawn”. This song was written before the pandemic, and even if things seem to have taken a turn for the worse in America in 2025, we can’t forget that there’ve been problems for a long time. More of these issues are explored in the later verses – incarceration, drugs and racism. These are not easy to solve in our capitalist society, where the people who can help others the most are afraid they might lose something by doing so.
The horns and strings come in during the chorus and continue through the second verse, building up through the second chorus. The first instrumental break gives both instruments a moment to shine. I like the use of space in this song. Not just the arrangement, but with how it’s mixed. The instruments don’t feel like they are competing for space. This song also only uses 3 chords, and it just goes to show how few you need to create an impactful song.
After the third verse, there’s a little break where the drums get a moment on their own, taking us back to the first bar of the intro, a nice palate cleanser before we get to the final chorus and the instrumental outro, where a fuzzy electric guitar wails a lament. You can really hear the pain in the delivery of this song; each element contributes to the feeling of sadness, echoed in a line in the final chorus, “We’re mourning in America”.
As many songwriters use music to process their own personal situation, I find it refreshing that an artist would step back and reflect on what’s going on in their country and be prepared to write about it. There’s a bit of fear around being too political in one’s writing and avoiding the difficult topics. But I also think that music can be an incredibly powerful motivator and an illuminator of truth. Though I also wonder, how many more bands will make songs like these before we see real change in our world.
We can only hope.