Tomorrow
The third single off of 1992s Your Arsenal studio album (and Morrissey’s 14th overall), ‘Tomorrow’ was released on September 8, 1992 only in the US. While the song reached number one on Billboard magazine's Hot Modern Rock Tracks chart, it failed to appear on its primary top 100 chart.
“In the US Reprise issue the track Tomorrow as a single, and stylish chief Steven Baker writes to me: ‘If we can’t make this a hit then we can’t do anything.’ Needless to say, [US record label Reprise] didn't make Tomorrow a hit.1
The single version of the song is a remix of the album track, and has a slightly longer running time (4:17 versus 4:06). The primary difference is the absence of the piano outro contained on the album version.
The single’s cover art features a photograph, courtesy of Linder Sterling, of Morrissey and bassist Gary Day lounging by the pool at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood, California.
“It emerges in a sleeve on which I languish by a swimming pool reading Variety magazine. In the background is bassist Gary Day, whom I most certainly have nothing against, but I ask that he be chopped off because he looks like a prop. I am told that no one knows how to take him out of the proofs (this is, after all, 1066), and so Gary remains on the sleeve and I feel slightly silly. Art must wait.”2
The photo on the back cover of the single was taken by Jürgen Vollmer3 and is from Johnny Stuart’s4 book, Rockers!5.
According to Stephane at PassionsJustLikeMine.com, ‘Tomorrow’ was written shortly before or during the Your Arsenal recording sessions in March 1992 at the Wool Hall in Bath. Produced by Mick Ronson, the musicians on the song are Boz Boorer (guitar), Alain Whyte (guitar), Gary Day (bass) and Spencer Cobrin (drums).
‘Tomorrow’ is a decidedly bleak muse upon both the insular and transient nature of existence. The song’s titular lyric is a metaphor for the passage of a lifetime and its inevitable outcome. The protagonist uneasily contemplates their remaining time upon the earth; indeed, “tomorrow” may come in a day, or perhaps it may not be for many decades. Such uncertainty can exact a fearsome toll upon heart and mind.
The singer wonders what awaits him when he reaches “tomorrow”. Whereas Morrissey proclaimed that “I am human and I need to be loved” in ‘How Soon Is Now’, ‘Tomorrow’ finds him questioning whether he will even manage to retain his capacity for love (“Tomorrow/Will it really come?/And if it does come/Will I still be human?”), or if it will have atrophied in the intervening time. This is the linchpin of the lyrics as detail other than the ravages of time (“And what must come before/The pain in my arms/The pain in my legs/Through my shiftless body”) are conspicuously absent, which only underscores
