Music’s Most Neglected Day of the Week

Dear listeners,

The day after Memorial Day — or any day that directly follows a beginning-of-the-week holiday — is one of those Tuesdays that feels like a Monday. A certain temporal fog lingers and will continue to confuse you all week: “Wait, what day is it again?” Well, today it is Tuesday. And I am here to offer you a sonic cure for that fog, something to ground you in the present: a playlist of Tuesday songs.

Friday, Saturday and Sunday are all perennial muses of popular music; even the dreaded Monday (Monday) has its memorable anthems. Tuesday, though, tends to get short shrift — or at least it did until 2014, when the rapper iLoveMakonnen released a ubiquitous ode to clubbing on the most banal day of the week. But Makonnen’s “Tuesday” certainly wasn’t the first song to pay tribute to (or shake a fist at) the second day of the traditional workweek. Decades earlier, Stevie Wonder and Lynyrd Skynyrd both used it as a backdrop for heartache, and it also inspired the moniker of a fictitious Rolling Stones heroine, in a song later covered beautifully by the recently departed folk singer Melanie.

All those songs are featured on today’s playlist, along with tracks from Blood Orange, the Pogues and, of course, the ’80s new-wave act ’Til Tuesday. If you find yourself wondering what day it is, just hum one of these tunes and all will be well. As long as they don’t stick in your head until tomorrow …

Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone,

Lindsay

Listen along while you read.

1. Stevie Wonder: “Tuesday Heartbreak”

It’s bad enough to be heartbroken — but being heartbroken on a Tuesday? Stevie Wonder understands the double indignity of that situation on this jazzy number from his great 1972 album “Talking Book”: “Tuesday heartbreak seems to be unfair, ’cause you say that you found another man.”

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