The Best Classic Rock For Your Early Morning Coffee

Waking early in the morning and staggering into the kitchen to fix a cup of coffee, you might think classic rock isn't your ideal soundtrack, with its driving rhythms, searing vocal lines, and guitar solos. In fact, you might turn to calmer genres, like smooth jazz or classical music. But just scratch under the surface, and you'll realize there are countless laid-back classic rock songs that make for a perfect early morning coffee soundtrack.

Here, we've selected five of our favorite relaxed rock classics that will help you start your day with a sense of tranquility and calm. These aren't just ballads: In fact, the most famous classic rock ballads, such as Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," often reach towards the epic to such a degree that they aren't relaxing at all. Instead, these tracks are delicate but bright, with an optimistic or reflective tone that makes them ideal for those quieter moments as we get our thoughts in order to go about our day. From the Beatles to Fleetwood Mac, here are our early morning coffee picks.

The Beatles classic "Here Comes the Sun" is one of the highlights of 1969's "Abbey Road," a gorgeous guitar-led ballad written by lead guitarist George Harrison. Harrison wrote the song in the garden of his friend Eric Clapton, having escaped there during a period when Harrison found himself weighed down with business meetings relating to the Beatles' company, Apple Corps.

On the surface, the song is inspired by the arrival of spring, but it also heralds the soothing return to nature and innocence after finding oneself becoming overburdened by worldly concerns. It also represents a moment of peace; at the time, Harrison's relationship with his bandmates was growing strained. However, "Here Comes the Sun" seemingly reveals that he was optimistic for his own future, as he was beginning to blossom as a songwriter despite struggling to make the other Beatles take many of his compositions seriously, as they did songs by John Lennon or Paul McCartney.

The song was never released as a single in the U.S., but thanks to its optimistic tone and seasonal appeal when spring finally rolls around, it has emerged as the most popular Beatles song streaming on Spotify. After spending his time in the Fab Four taking a backseat to the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership, the numbers speak for themselves in terms of Harrison's songwriting talent.

"The Velvet Underground & Nico" may offer some of the most discordant and avant-garde music of the 1960s, but the 1967 album actually opens with a surprisingly mellow introduction with the immaculate "Sunday Morning." Featuring vocals from Lou Reed that feel like an intimate whisper, the track is characterized by its beautiful lead melody, performed by John Cale on the celesta.

As well as being a lyrical morning song, "Sunday Morning" features gentle instrumentation that evokes the world waking up, the sky softening with light and flowers opening. Reed and Cale penned the song as a last-minute addition to the album, with producer Tom Wilson believing that up to that point it lacked a song that would work as a potential single. And while there are other mellow moments on the album, most notably the Nico-led "I'll Be Your Mirror," nothing quite matches "Sunday Morning" for its laid-back atmosphere. The single failed to chart on its release, but "Sunday Morning" now stands as one of the greatest opening tracks to any classic album.

A second Velvet Underground pick? 1969's "Pale Blue Eyes," though the openly caustic lyrics may undermine the calm instrumentation.

Pink Floyd's most enduring ballad, "Wish You Were Here," was written by David Gilmour and Roger Waters, the band's conceptual mastermind whose big ideas shaped their greatest projects, including "The Wall" and "The Dark Side of the Moon." On "Wish You Were Here," the centerpiece of the album of the same name, Waters is exploring his feelings toward Syd Barrett, one of Pink Floyd's founding members who was forced to exit the band as his mental health declined in the late 1960s.

A reflective folk ballad built around an acoustic guitar and Gilmour's expressive voice, the song is elevated by Pink Floyd's effective use of studio effects. The song's haunting intro, which is played on a 12-string guitar, is given distance by sounding as if it is being received through a crackly AM radio, and the addition of a second acoustic gives the song a deeply nostalgic emotional resonance. It has become a favorite cover song for buskers and open mic nights. But the original album version boasts a depth that makes it one of classic rock's most comforting songs despite its theme of estrangement.

Thin Lizzy were best known for their party-starting hard rock anthems, most notably the timeless "The Boys Are Back in Town." Their legendary 1978 live album "Live & Dangerous" gives some indication of how incendiary the band's shows could be. But as frontman and primary songwriter Phil Lynott proved repeatedly, he also had a softer side, as shown on the 1979 track "Sarah."

"Sarah" features on the album "Black Rose: A Rock Legend," where, nestled among harder-edged tracks, it seems to represent the contrasting directions — love, fatherhood, rock stardom, and growing drug addiction — that Lynott was being pulled in at the time. Written to celebrate the birth of his daughter, the song is a sweet declaration of parental love and an expression of the unadulterated joy and protectiveness Lynott felt at her arrival.

Produced by Tony Visconti, the track features multi-layered guitars from Gary Moore, who also receives a writing credit and provides a typically virtuosic solo that frames the soul-inspired track in the band's usual hard rock mode. But it is ultimately a refreshingly innocent song, and you'd have to wake up in a particularly bad mood not to feel yourself melt a little on hearing it.

There aren't many bands from the classic rock era that provide the perfect soundtrack to quieter moments quite like Fleetwood Mac, particularly with the music they created during their "Rumours" period. Widely considered the band's masterpiece and one of the bestselling albums of all time, the 1977 collection was recorded during a moment of crisis for the band, when the relationships of the band's two couples — Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and John and Christine McVie — were starting to collapse.

"Dreams" is a Stevie Nicks-penned number that proved to be Fleetwood Mac's biggest single, and their only No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Its lyrics are a pointed critique of Buckingham, whose opening song, "Second Hand News," sees him discussing the pair moving on from one another. "Dreams," which is the second track on "Rumours," seems an immediate riposte. While Nicks sings sarcastically, "You say you want your freedom / Well, who am I to keep you down?" the song later warns her former partner that "women, they will come and go" and hints he will experience "dreams of loneliness."

But the song also exudes calmness — possibly that of the mystic, witchy figure of Nicks feeling confident that she can see the future perfectly. The song contains references to thunder and rain, but like a storm viewed through the window from the comfort of one's home, it reinforces the narrator's sense of their own security and inner peace.