9 Songs About Tuesday to Brighten Your Work Week
Tuesday might not be the most popular day of the week, but hey, at least you’re one day closer to Friday! So in today’s article, we bring you a list of our favorite songs about Tuesday to help liven up your week.
Best Songs About Tuesday You’l Love
Let’s begin with a song by The Moody Blues.
Tuesday Afternoon by The Moody Blues
The Moody Blues’ 1968 single “Tuesday Afternoon,” starts us off by taking us on a psychedelic journey through a quiet Tuesday afternoon!
Moody Blues front man Justin Hayward described writing this song in the form of a stream of consciousness while smoking a joint in his yard on a Tuesday afternoon. The lyrics describe someone’s nebulous moment of introspection, wonder, euphoria, and liberation as he wanders through the world of a Tuesday afternoon. There is no story told in these lyrics, nor any concrete contextual images. Rather, the poetry in this song comes from its ability to capture a single moment in time and elevate it to the height of beauty.
What really makes this song a triumph is its progressive structure, which allows the Moody Blues to musically explore a wide range of human experiences in a single song. It begins with the hazy, drifting melody before transitioning to a bouncy rock beat and ending on an orchestral flourish. Essentially, nothing in this song is expected, and it creates the experience of going deeper and deeper into an inner wonderland before reaching a resolution.
It’s a song about internal journeys, those that happen inside the mind, and while the events of any given Tuesday afternoon may seem mundane, they are changing us their own ways.
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Tuesday by ILOVEMAKONNEN
The days of the week are one of the ways by which we measure the passage of time and structure our lives. We know that week days are for work and weekends are for pleasure, but certain demanding lifestyles can flip that balance on its head.
American rapper ILOVEMAKONNEN has had an unusual and storied career, working as a drug dealer and beautician before engineering his own start in the music world. “Tuesday” is seemingly about the early, unstructured days of his career. After describing his drug-dealing success, he sings, “I’ve been working graveyard shifts every other weekend / Ain’t got no f***ing time to party on the weekend.”
Here, ILOVEMAKONNEN seems to reflect on his busy schedule as a drug-dealer and regrets how he doesn’t exactly have time for fun on the weekend. But he finds a way around that in the chorus, where he proclaims, “Got the club going up on a Tuesday.” Tuesday isn’t most people’s first choice for a night out, but it’s all he has so he makes it work.
Notably, ILOVEMAKONNEN also collaborated with Canadian rapper Drake on a much more uplifting remix of this song. In their version, drug-dealing is a thing of their past, but they’re still just as busy, only for a different reason. The remix is more about the difficult schedules of celebrity rappers.
They’re still going to the club on a Tuesday, but that’s because their weekends are booked up with the shows they’re playing. In this version, as with the original, there is a bittersweet hint of irony in the lyrics. Success feels good, but it also takes hard work and sacrifice.
For a song about partying and going to the club, “Tuesday” is very raucous. In fact, it has rather subdued, breathy musical quality. That’s because it isn’t about a normal party – it’s about a Tuesday party, populated by a crowd of outsiders.
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Tuesday by Bill Wurtz
And speaking of outsiders, keyboard virtuoso Bill Wurtz is another musician who has single-handedly dictated his career from outside of the record industry. And that’s a good thing, because it’s allowed him to maintain his distinctive, quirky style throughout the years.
Wurtz is well-known for his short jingles, and here, he gives a celebratory 40-second jingle about Tuesday. Lyrically, while Wurtz claims he’s going to “show you how to live your life”, there doesn’t seem to be any groundbreaking conclusion in this song. Beginning with a little self-deprecating fourth-wall breaking, it mostly seems to consist of a series of non-sequiturs, leading to “Before you know it, it’ll be Tuesday.” Yet what this song does wonderfully is heighten the beauty of the mundane. With catchy, upbeat music, Wurtz manages to convince that us that Tuesday really is something to celebrate and look forward to.
Songs like “Tuesday” show the power that well-written pieces of music can have. It produces an irresistibly happy feeling. Wurtz isn’t singing anything profound – he’s just anticipating Tuesday – but he’s found a way to make us feel good about it, and that’s what matters.
- You Also Might Like: Songs About Monday
Ruby Tuesday by the Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones released “Ruby Tuesday” during their psychedelic period in 1967, and it’s whimsical, baroque instrumentation and tender sensibilities made it their 4th Number One in the U.S.
“Ruby Tuesday” is a song about being left by your lover. It is sung from the point of view of man saying his last goodbyes to a lover, whom he calls “Ruby Tuesday.” In the verses, he reflects on her elusive nature, which makes her departure inevitable if painful.
The admiring way in which he speaks about her, even as he tells her he is going to miss her, gives this song its ironic edge. The lyrics manifest no bitterness or resentment, only grief and solemn resignation. In fact, the man in the song seems to admire Ruby for her freedom and independence, the same qualities that took her away from him. With this song comes the potent realization that the qualities we admire most in a partner are sometimes the ones that doom our relationship from the start.
“Ruby Tuesday” was penned primarily by guitarist Keith Richards, and many have speculated that it may have been about his ex-girlfriend Linda Keith, with whom he parted ways shortly before writing the song. There’s nothing like a broken heart to inspire a beautiful song!
Tuesday Heartbreak by Stevie Wonder
Stevie Wonder brings us another Tuesday-themed breakup anthem in the form of his jazzy 1972 pop ballad “Tuesday Heartbreak.”
“Tuesday Heartbreak” tells of a man whose lover has left him for someone else. He reflects upon his betrayal and disappointment at losing her, singing “Tuesday heartbreak seems to be a drag / When you know that you love her especially.” That’s the irony of this song: he loves her the most, yet she’s chosen someone else.
Heartbreak is a common subject for pop music, but Stevie Wonder puts his own spin on them here by not dwelling too much on the misery. He’s far more positive than most of us would be in his situation, maintaining hope that his lover will “Catch up with [his] dreams” so that they can be together all the time. In fact, he focuses far more intensely on his love for her than on the fact that she has left him.
Combined with fast-paced, danceable rhythm and Wonder’s bouncy keyboard playing, this makes for a cheery tune about abandonment and betrayal. Perhaps Wonder’s point is that heartbreak, like all things in life, is transient. His heart is broken on Tuesday, but things might be better by Wednesday.
Tuesday’s Gone by Lynyrd Skynyrd
“Tuesday’s Gone,” by southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, is all about letting go of the past.
“Tuesday’s Gone” was released in 1973 with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s debut album Pronounced ‘Lĕh-‘nérd ‘Skin-‘nérd, and 25-year-old front man Ronnie Van Zant may have been inspired to write this song while anticipating the changes a new record deal would bring.
On the surface, it seems to be about a man packing up his things and leaving his lover to start anew. He never gives a reason for his departure. He doesn’t express any ill will toward the life he is leaving behind, nor does he express any excitement for what is to come. It is simply time for a change. The chorus, “Tuesday’s gone with the wind,” is an over reference to Margret Mitchell’s classic 1936 novel Gone With the Wind, a story about upheaval in the American South that Lynyrd Skynyrd may have related to as they looked toward their impending adulthood and the changes that their success would bring.
Lynyrd Skynyrd underscore this song with a traditional blues rhythm (an apt choice for a song about travelling since blues music was originally based on the rhythms produced by steam trains), and this gives it a rather melancholy feel. “Tuesday’s Gone” reminds us that change is a necessary if painful part of life. As Lynyrd Skynyrd say goodbye to the past, they usher in the future with solemn acceptance.
Tuesday Morning by the Pogues
Of course, it’s never easy to release the past, especially when we have suffered a painful loss.
This 1993 track by Celtic rock band the Pogues takes place on a Tuesday morning as man reflects on a troubled relationship. In the second verse, he sings “I wished it was Monday evening,” implying that he longs for a happier time before Tuesday morning, when everything went wrong.
There is an element of confusion in this song, as if we aren’t really sure where we are in time. That’s because this is a song about simultaneously longing for the past, regretting the present, and worrying about the future. In other words, it sounds confusing because it captures a moment of personal confusion.
The nature of the relationship described in the song is never made clear. Maybe this is another breakup song, or maybe it’s just about someone missing a loved one who is far away. It’s hard to tell, but one of the things that makes this song compelling is its uplifting chorus, where the man in the song claim that he knows his lover is dreaming of him, bringing him comfort even though they are apart.
That’s what saves this song from getting too melodramatic. It’s a sad song, but it’s punctuated by hope. The two lovers share a connection even when they are not together. Maybe tomorrow won’t be so scary after all.
Tuesday Moon by Neutral Milk Hotel
Sometimes when a love affair begins, we want to throw ourselves headfirst into it and get lost.
Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1993 song “Tuesday Moon” is about a man so in love with a woman that it consumes him. This is song is full of visceral and original images, and it perfectly captures the way a passionate romance can feel. Magnum’s description of scooping someone into himself is a great metaphor for the ways in which people crave one another and scramble to grab as much of each other as they can manage.
His comparisons of love to “a building / Pushing up to the sky,” and “a drunken stupor,” will resonate with anyone who has ever been madly in love. There is a euphoria to it, but one that has a tendency to make us act foolishly.
On the other hand, the chorus of the song, “Oh I love you on a Tuesday moon / Vegetable hand on my perfume,” doesn’t seem to mean much. This song is full of surreal and seemingly meaningless imagery, but in a song about lovesickness, nonsense is quite at home. It could be that the love is question is so great that it transcends traditional metaphors, so the man in the song has to make up his own, which only he understands.
Or it could be that he is so enamored with the object of his affections that he isn’t thinking clearly. Everything is fuzzy – even the guitars – and that’s why things aren’t making sense.
Infatuation can be both blissful and painful. Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Tuesday Moon” explores its all-consuming nature. It’s a great depiction of the feeling of getting lost in someone else.
Tuesday by Hippo Campus
“Tuesday” by Hippo Campus, is a cheery song, full of lively electric guitars and proclamations of “Sometimes it’s the best day of my life,” so it might come as surprise that singer and guitarist Jake Luppen wrote this song after a break-up.
For all of its high energy, “Tuesday” also deals with some darker themes, such as youthful angst, loneliness, and alcoholism. The singer describes drinking boxed wine alone and lamenting his failed relationships. So why is it the best day of his life?
Tuesday might represent a turning point. The singer’s life isn’t going according to plan, but he’s had some time for self-reflection and decided to make the most of things. It’s often at our lowest points that we come to terms with the changes we need to make, and this song takes place at such a moment. “Sometimes they call it Tuesday / Sometimes they call it the best day of my life” sings Luppen. To everyone else, it’s just Tuesday, but him, with his fresh outlook on life, it’s a hopeful new beginning.
Conclusion
Tuesday falls at a bit of an awkward spot in the week – not quite the middle, but not quite the end or the beginning either. There might not be as many songs about Tuesday as there are songs about Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, but that’s what makes the songs on this list stand out. They take the unexpected route and explore all the possibilities a Tuesday has to offer.
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