Angel, You Can't Be Serious

Thoughts on suspicion as a state of mind

I read a great deal of random stuff, about a lot of things, and that’s part of how ideas come together for me. One thing I remember reading still comes to mind once in awhile, because it captures something I write about often: the psychology of how we hold the ideas we have.

It’s a Reddit thread by a person who argues that “Angel of the Morning,” the classic country-pop song about a one-night stand, is an allegory for Lucifer.

A tiny bit of background, so you can get an idea of how I come up with these pieces: I was in Front Royal, Virginia back in early 2024, to visit and photograph Rural King, a neat store I wanted to write about. This song, Angel of the Morning, was playing on the in-store music, and I just googled it, because I google and read about a lot of things I come across. And I found this Reddit thread, which I thought was interesting. So I’m writing this because of a trip I took to go photograph a store. You never know what will come out of something!

Anyway, the thread author writes, after noting that there already is a sort of “Angel of the Morning”—Lucifer:

For whatever reason, it is sinful for these two to be together. Yet, per the 1st verse, she is convincing the other that its ok because she chose to start this. She is a woman who will follow her passion no matter how sinful they are. She is portraying herself as both Lucifer the seducer and as Lucifer the one who wont be blinded by Heaven’s light.

So....yeah, still a love song, but, also a weird, seemingly anti-Christian allegory. I just thought it was weird to see that in a popular love ballad

Spooky little extra: Chip Taylor, the writer of the song, said he didn’t know what the lyrics meant as he came up with them. From an interview, paraphrased but perhaps involving direct quotes, from the interviewer:

In his [Taylor’s] own mind, he feels that he didn’t so much as WRITE this song as that he DREAMED it… the way the lyrics flowed out, meshing perfectly with the series of chords he had been strumming – there just had to be some kind of divine intervention

Divine intervention? Or, you know…

One commenter notes that “just call me angel of the morning”—or however you would or wouldn’t punctuate the chorus line—is abnormal syntax, and doesn’t sound like something you’d write if the meaning were plain and literal. (It would be “call me angel in the morning.”)¹ Hmm.

It’s like a little scratch in a big TV screen; you can say “Oh well, I can barely see it, it might as well not be there,” but it is there, and you can see it, and every time you about convince yourself you don’t, you snap back to the beginning.

Now no, I don’t think the song is about Lucifer, and whether or not the original author of the thread really thinks this, I see it as just a bit of interpretive fun. It’s a mature if a bit overwrought song about a woman being okay with a one-night stand and not pretending it’s more than that. And while the famous version by Juice Newton came out in 1981, the song was written in the 1960s. It’s a bit quaint how wordy and introspective it is, explaining the psychology and justifications of casual sex in a way that was risqué at the time, but which is no longer necessary or expected today. In other words, part of its lyrical weirdness is that it wouldn’t even written today.

In other words, I think of this sort of thing a bit like ghost stories: spooking yourself a little while also knowing it isn’t real. (And by “this sort of thing” I don’t mean the occult, but playing the “what if this conspiracy theory were true?” game.)

What I do find fascinating here, and a tad disquieting, is that it really is impossible to say, absolutely definitively, that the song isn’t making allusions to Lucifer on some level. Maybe not even intentionally; maybe a little cheekily. But this is really more about probabilities and likelihoods. You can live in a mental world in which “Pop song about a one-night stand is a coded ode to the devil” and not be crazy, exactly, just interpreting the world in a very, very different way from most people.

The broad point here, which I think this whole anecdote illustrates, is that we often do interpretation in our heads based on our worldview, without understanding that we’re actually doing that. The interpretation happens almost automatically, or subconsciously, and we end up thinking that we’re seeing a thing that confirms our worldview, when in reality we’ve interpreted it through that filter without knowing it.

We bring our implicit ideology, our mental furniture, with us when we see things. It is very difficult to admit to yourself that what you think you are seeing, plainly and unvarnished, is really being passed through your mental and ideological filters.

Of course, this is also in some way a warning to myself. I love to find stories that seem hidden in plain site, and I wonder if that curiosity can become this sort of default suspicion, if fed with the wrong sources or cultivated in the wrong way? You can start to sense yourself straining to see the hidden meaning; that curiosity morphing into a feeling that nothing is what it seems. And it can happen imperceptibly. You think you are watching the world becoming more inscrutable, but you are really experiencing a shrinking of your mental world.

It’s also easy, I think, to fall into this sort of suspicious what-if mindset when you’re alone. A lot of it just falls away when you get out and do things. It’s like your brain is trying to stimulate itself and is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find something interesting to latch onto and think about. I have to wonder how much of what we think of as “extreme politics” or conspiracy theories is really just an outlet for this loneliness-induced psychology.

I remember reading a social media post that went something like, “When I start wanting to color-code my towels, I know it’s time to get out.” Basically, I think that explains a lot of our current climate.

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Related Reading:

Okay, The Beatles White Album is *Kind Of* Haunted

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The Final Filter

Urbanist Ecumenism

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1. The counterargument is that there are a million and one wooden, clunky song lyrics that have no plausible connection to Lucifer, so you don’t read them as having some hidden meaning. You just say, “Huh, that’s a poorly written song!” and move on. I can’t even think of one, but I know I’ve heard many.