Nina Simone / Here Comes the Sun (Remastered) / 1971
New World Coming
reverent, buoyant, quietly urgent
This is a short, incantatory hymn of hope written by Nina Simone (music by her, lyrics credited to Simone and Gene Taylor) that treats social transformation as a near-biblical event. It builds almost entirely through repetition of a single promise, then pivots into an apocalyptic quotation from Revelation before returning to the refrain, fusing civil-rights optimism with millenarian imagery.
utopian hope collective liberation religious apocalypse renewal and dawn faith as political vision
Who's speaking
A communal prophetic voice speaking on behalf of 'you and me' -- not a single narrator addressing a lover or antagonist, but a visionary addressing a whole listening community, promising a future that is imminent but not yet arrived.
What happens
The song doesn't tell a story in a conventional sense; it moves from anticipation to vision. It opens by naming a new world as already approaching, then repeats and intensifies that promise across two verses, adding the qualities the new world will carry -- peace, joy, love. At its center the song breaks from its own voice entirely to recite an apocalyptic vision borrowed from scripture, before snapping back to the original refrain, now sounding both hard-won and unresolved since the song stops rather than concludes.
How it's built
The structure is deliberately circular and liturgical rather than verse-chorus-bridge in the pop sense: near-identical stanzas of promise bracket a spoken or sung interpolation of biblical text, and the song ends by returning to its opening line rather than resolving forward, leaving the 'new world' permanently on the horizon.
Section by section
Opening refrain
“just around the bend”
The song announces its central image immediately: the new world is not distant utopia but something almost within reach, spatially close though temporally suspended. This framing sets up the song's central tension between imminence and non-arrival.
First development
The promise is elaborated with the qualities the coming world will possess -- peace, joy, love -- delivered as a rising, almost liturgical list. The repetition functions less as narrative progression and more as ritual affirmation, the kind of language used to sustain hope under duress rather than to describe an event.
Second refrain
A near-repeat of the opening, but denser -- the qualities are now piled on top of each other in overlapping order, giving the impression of intensifying conviction, as if the singer is willing the vision into being through sheer repetition.
Biblical interpolation
“seven angels having the seven last plagues”
The song abruptly leaves its own idiom for a direct citation of apocalyptic scripture, describing divine judgment and the survivors who triumph over worldly powers. This section reframes the 'new world' not as gradual social progress but as a rupture -- an old order ending in judgment before anything new can begin. It borrows the authority and finality of religious prophecy to lend weight to a secular hope for justice.
Closing return
The song ends by returning to its opening promise without ever depicting the new world itself, only the moment before it. The abrupt, unresolved ending leaves the vision permanently prospective -- comfort and unrest held together in the same gesture.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated opening formula announcing the new world's arrival functions like a chant or affirmation, building conviction through insistence rather than argument.
- intertextuality/biblical allusion
- The direct lift from Revelation recontextualizes a text about divine judgment and reward as a metaphor for social apocalypse -- the old order's collapse and the vindication of those who endured it.
- anticipatory imagery
- Recurrent images of dawn, morning, and something 'just around the bend' keep the transformation perpetually imminent, turning hope into a structural principle of the song rather than a plot point.
- asyndeton/list structure
- The stacking of 'peace,' 'joy,' 'love' without connective conjunction gives the qualities of the new world a chant-like, incremental accumulation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a civil-rights-era hymn in which 'new world' stands for racial and social justice not yet realized, with the apocalyptic interlude functioning as a coded assertion that the current order -- the 'beast' and its 'mark' -- will be judged and overturned. The scripture is not decorative; it supplies moral authority and inevitability to a political hope that popular language alone might not carry. An alternative, less historically specific reading takes the song as a more general spiritual meditation on renewal and faith, with the biblical passage functioning as pure devotional content rather than political allegory. Both readings can coexist -- the song's power partly comes from refusing to specify which world is ending and which is coming.
Context
This song appears on Simone's 1971 album 'Here Comes the Sun,' released during a period when she was deeply engaged with the civil rights and Black liberation movements, and much of her work from this era carries explicit political and spiritual weight. The specific circumstances of this song's composition are not something I can verify in detail, but its placement alongside her other socially conscious material from the period supports a reading rooted in collective liberation rather than purely personal or romantic hope.
Listen for
- how the repeated refrain accumulates emotional weight through near-identical restatement rather than melodic variation
- the tonal and textural shift when the biblical text enters -- listen for a change in delivery, from song-like repetition to something closer to recitation
- the way the song withholds description of the new world itself, keeping the listener suspended in anticipation
- the closing lines, which loop back to the opening promise instead of resolving, leaving the piece formally open-ended
About Nina Simone
Nina Simone was an American composer, concert pianist, singer, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title the High Priestess of Soul.
1933 - 2003 / United States
Full biography and catalogue