When Music and Song Holds Our Secrets: The Enduring Mystery and Art of 'Sunday Morning' song by Nico, Velvet Underground.
Design is never confined to one discipline - it breathes through architecture, painting, digital media, and just as deeply through music.
To design a house, a chair, or a city block is not so different from composing a song. The process begins with silence and space, then slowly layers rhythm, harmony, and structure.
When you listen to Brian Eno’s generative works, for example, you can almost feel the architecture of sound, a blueprint of tones drifting in and out, creating a place you inhabit with your mind.
Music has always been a form of design thinking. Consider how Kendrick Lamar builds his albums: each track is not a standalone piece but part of an unfolding narrative, connected through subtle motifs, voices, and atmospheres. It’s not unlike walking through a building where every corridor, every window, is tuned to guide you somewhere deeper. The design of music, like architecture, is a negotiation between order and improvisation, between structure and the living pulse of human experience.
A beautiful illustration of this lies in Sunday Morning, a song by The Velvet Underground and Nico. Back in 1966, producer Tom Wilson convinced the band to replace Lou Reed’s lead vocals with Nico’s, transforming the piece into something ethereal and strange. The theme itself came from Andy Warhol, who suggested, “Why not make it a song about paranoia?” Reed responded with lyrics that still haunt: “Watch out, the world’s behind you.”
The paradox of the song is its design. On the surface, it is serene—a chiming glockenspiel, Nico’s steady voice, a melody that feels like Sunday light spilling into a quiet room. Yet beneath that calm lies unease, the lyrics whispering about wasted years and unseen watchers. It’s music that builds a space for you to enter, a room where tranquility and disquiet share the same walls.
I remember one summer evening, driving back from Carmel as the sun dissolved into California’s golden hills. The song played on the radio, and I was transfixed. Later, on a long drive to Los Angeles, I played it on repeat for six hours, cresting a hill just as Reed’s words filled the car: “It’s just the wasted years so close behind.” For a moment, the music and the landscape were one—the gold hills, the fading light, and the song itself felt designed to hold me inside a perfect frame of time.
That is what great design does, whether in architecture or music. It creates a place to dwell. A building might be imagined as a score, its rooms like measures, its facades like refrains. A piece of music might be experienced as architecture, mapping highs and lows like a topography of memory. Think of how Björk’s collaborations merge technology, nature, and voice into immersive environments that are both sonic and spatial. Or how Ryuichi Sakamoto translated memory and ecology into music that feels as tactile as wood, water, or stone.
The act of designing, whether in sound or in space, is a matter of listening deeply. Architects listen to the land and its history; musicians listen to silence, to breath, to heartbeat. Both seek resonance—the kind that makes a house more than shelter or a song more than entertainment.
Sunday Morning lingers because it embodies that dual nature of design. It reassures and unsettles. It offers a fresh start and a reminder of time slipping by. It shows us how music, like architecture, can construct spaces where we linger, question, and perhaps discover ourselves anew.
The Velvet Underground, Nico
'Sunday Morning'
Sunday morning brings the dawning
It's just a restless feeling by my side
Early dawning, Sunday morning
It's just the wasted years so close behind
Watch out, the world's behind you
There's always someone around you who will call
It's nothing at all
Sunday morning, and I'm falling
I've got a feeling I don't want to know
Early dawning, Sunday morning
It's all the streets you crossed, not so long ago
Watch out, the world's behind you
There's always someone around you who will call
It's nothing at all
Watch out, the world's behind you
There's always someone around you who will call
It's nothing at all
Sunday morning
Sunday morning
Sunday morning
Sunday morning
Songwriters: John Cale / Lou Reed
Sunday Morning lyrics ©
