Sunday (The Day Before My Birthday)

I know Moby was really affected by September 11th and this album is influenced by it, but the original song "Sunday" by Sylvia Robinson is about a lost love. If September 11th was the inspiration, maybe he liked the idea of a nice day where everything is fine and then the following one was dark and terrible. Not LITERALLY Sunday, but just the day before 9.11.

Either way, it's the best song on the album.

I love this

Moby's birthday is September 11. Therefore the song title refers to September 11th, 2001. When you read the lyrics in that context it makes more sense

Woah. I didn't have a clue about that! xD My interpertation has completely changed, now...

11-September-2001 wasn't on a Sunday: I was working across the street from the Pentagon for a Defense Contractor, when the plane hit the Pentagon. While it was in fact a very soul-wrenching day, it wasn't a Sunday (otherwise the Pentagon would've been more empty)

major valor..

Sunday (the Day BEFORE My Birthday)

sunday was a bright day YESTERDAY

Yeah but Sep 11, 2001 was on a Tuesday so Sunday was not the day before his birthday that year.

omg people. wow. roflmmfao.

who is the artist he is sampling on this track, does anyone know?

i took a gamble and just purchased '18' on a whim. the only album of moby's that i had been familiar with was 'play'; i had been looking for that record for a while, and i finally found it at a record store earlier this year. well, they also happened to be selling a copy of '18,' so i decided to pick that album up as well. and i couldn't be happier that i did so, because this song alone was worth the price of admission. as someone has already pointed out, the comments on here about september 11th are hilarious. the lyrics aren't even moby's. he simply sampled some snippets from someone else's song, so since these are merely small parts taken from a greater whole, there's really no room to make inferences due to the fact that we're missing at least half of the original song. i'm not trying to be a smart-ass. someone could make the (far-reaching) argument that by trimming the lyrics, moby has given the song a new and different context. but ultimately, i think the actual lyrics themselves aren't meant to have much weight here; it's the way the notes are sung, rather than the words themselves, that really grabs me. musically, though, moby did create a very different context for this song. there will be detractors, but i like sylvia robinson's vocal better in moby's song than in her own. her version has a meandering acoustic guitar and string accompaniment that (to my ears) doesn't provide the right frame for her vocals. moby's instrumentation, on the other hand, is absolutely fantastic (at least in my book). he keeps the string section but his score is not at all the same since the strings add a very different harmonic counterpoint. and his version contains a radically different guitar part as well; the guitar is a lot less pronounced in the mix since it only comes in to provide a few accents here and there, but i think it's quite a bit more interesting. the piano, though, is what delivers the major coup. i fucking love the piano in this song. it's got an awesome rollicking rhythm to it and the chord changes are simply beautiful. to me, this song is easily the highlight of '18.' and it's also a song that i relish all the more when listening to the album because it's the lovely rainbow after the abysmal storm that is "jam for the ladies."