Song of the Century: Sheena Easton's "Morning Train"

It took a perfect pop song to revive the Substack after 6 months of silence

Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train” is the greatest song of all time. The first time I heard it—blasting from a Spotify Radio playlist through the dinky Blutooth speaker I’ve had since 2016—it injected some desperately needed life into yet another of the early pandemic’s endless rounds of doing dishes. Scrub Daddy in hand, I tapped my feet and shoulder-danced through the song’s bouncy verses, which narrate the simple story of a horny woman waiting for her man to come home and give her the businesses: “It seems to last forever, and time goes slowly by / ‘til babe and me’s together, then it starts to fly.”

By the time we reached the song’s soaring chorus, with its ascending minor chords accentuating the yearning until the major-seventh release when baby finally comes home again and finds me waitin’ for him—reader, I was moving! The floor mat in front of the sink was my dance floor, and I somehow pulled off the feat of simultaneously cleaning ot the oil from the corners of a dirty baking sheet and outdoing John Travolta at the peak of his Saturday Night Fever powers.

That chorus is so good, no wonder they repeat it about six times throughout the course of the song. Credit to Easton, songwriter Florrie Palmer, and producer Christopher Neil. They know a good thing when they see it. I took the rare step of drying my hands just to whip out my phone and start the song over.

In the nearly four years since, my life has been a Sysyphean journey to reaching that same level of entranced euphoria. I played it during dishes the next night and the next, still enjoying it quite a bit but failing to reach the point where I felt taken away. I’ve put it on during long drives in the car, the only place where, despite the bad acoustics, I feel I can sing to the true volume my heart desires. Fun, but in a different way. I even did the song at karaoke, only to find that the song’s dated gender politics don’t sit well with contemporary audiences.

“Your song was a little sexist, don’t you think?” my friend asked half-ironically when I took my seat, as if it wasn’t enough to pick the greatest song of all time on karaoke night at a packed bar and realize in real time just how far it sat outside of my range.

Is the song sexist? Probably. The singer doesn’t appear to have a job, or anything else to do that might conflict with the hours she wiles away: “All day I think of him, dreamin’ of him constantly.” It’s a three-minute-and-20-second exhortation of a decidedly male fantasy. The woman has nothing whatsoever to do except pine away at home for the next roll in the hay. And even if she does have a job, it’s baby who’s the breadwinner: “He works all day to earn his pay, / so we can play all niiiiiIIIGHT.” Gosh, that high note. It’s fantastic to hear her hit it, and at karaoke, the perfect place in the song to eat absolute shit.

But I defy anyone, no matter their gender, to listen to “Morning Train” and identify with anyone other than the singer, the one doing all the waiting around and pining. Sure, it’s about an encounter with a man “amazingly full of fight” after a long day at work, but the song isn’t interested in the act itself so much as the anticipation, the eager expectation of a good time that settles in only after the relationship has gone on for long enough to suggest longevity but not so long that the threat of staleness has crept in. And who hasn’t been there?

What’s more, even if the feminist critics don’t approve, the Marxist ones should feel more at home. In the world of “Morning Train,” jobs are rendered as little more than distractions from sex.

True, there are people out there for whom jobs are sex. It’s why we get all that euphemism-laden business talk about who’s “fucking” who on this contract or that deal, the kind of talk Succession so relentlessly and effectively lampooned. For most of us, however, it’s a poor substitute for the real thing. Who out there can’t empathize with poor Sheena, stuck doing God knows what all day when all she really wants to do is get it on? Even the dates themselves are a formality: “He takes me to a movie, or to a restaurant / slow dancing, anything I want,” but then it's only “when he’s with” her that she really “catches a light.” Christ, man, get the check, and get her out of there!

Cynics out there might quibble with this and write the song off as capitalist chest-beating, dismissing the singer and her desire as nothing more than the sexual rewards for a day spend as a compliant cog in the money machine. Easton’s vocal suggests otherwise. It’s the flip way she sings about his silly job and his uninspired date ideas that clue us into the song’s true message, which is no more complicated than, “Stop wasting your time at that stupid office and give me some lovin’ already!”

Yet, if on first listen, the song seems to end on a triumphant note, its choruses ratcheting up a key or two with every reprise, it’s only now that I’ve listened to it four million times that its true downer soul reveals itself. The more I hear them, the more those repeated, key-modulated choruses feel like an endless cycle, the yearning getting more powerful, the releases feeling less and less cathartic. Sheena even breaks the routine as the song starts to fade, replacing the line, “My baby takes the morning train,” with “He’s always on that morning train.” The poor thing’s trapped in this series forever. Even when the ecstasy of night comes, there’s still another morning waiting, one in which she “stumbles out of bed, stretchin’ and a’-yawnin’, another day ahead.”

But then, there are far worse traps to be caught in than a state of perpetual turn-on, knowing that when that five o’clock train pulls in, there will be a very special friend on board. If that were Sisyphus’ task, I doubt we’d hear him complaining.

Happy holidays!