The Morning Never Comes

The Morning Never Comes is a song written by Katsy Pline, that I arranged for the Free Key Choir.

Katsy Pline is a singer and guitarist living in Berkeley, CA. Drawing from the melancholic yearning of early country and folk, Katsy’s heartbreak ballads spin tales of apocalypse, beauty and loss amidst the ruin of the present.

Some notes from Katsy Pline about the song:

The Morning Never Comes was written in the fall of 2021 in the midst of a fire season that saw several of the wild spaces while spending time wandering in burn. More and more of the East Bay’s solemn oaks turned ash, their leaves marked by the persistent spread of sudden oak death. Faced with the slow catastrophe of climate change and the intransigence of an economic system built on the exploitation of all life, it is tempting to give in to hopelessness and despair, nihilistically submitting to the non-future that feels all but certain. ‘The world will not be saved,’ as the anonymous authors of Desert put it. And yet, life persists, the seasons turn, the sun rises and sets. How can we continue to labor after the end of the world once we have abandoned our religious faith that the world can be saved? To live honestly in the blue and melancholy of the present when fantasies of peace, ease and contentment have been rendered impossible? Harmonically and formally, it syncretically draws on both the post romantic language of jazz and the lonesome yearning of country music to capture the beauty and despair of our time. Equal parts great American songbook and sandstone canyon crooning, ‘the morning never comes’ is a sweet paean to the joy and beauty that can be found struggling to continue amidst the ruins.

You can hear the original version of The Morning Never Comes on bandcamp from her album, No Peace in the Valley.