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The best songwriters of all time (22): Van Morrison
He was already a celebrated singer when Van Morrison started the song letter. And never forgot that even complex lyrics with tricky formulations want to be sung at some point.
He began his career with the earthy Belfast-R & b of Them, but soon developed his very own variety of rock’n’roll, who mixed Yates and Dylan, Jackie Wilson and Leadbelly with a pinch of Irish mysticism. Only van the man could sing a line like “if i ventured in the slipstream/between the viaducts of your dreams” without having to be ashamed of its vocal arts.
“Brown Eyed Girl”:
In the wake of his commercial success with “Brown Eyed Girl”, he withdrew in 1967, but already came up with his masterpiece “Astral Weeks” the following year.
“Poetry and Mythical Musings, Channeled from My Imagination” he called the result that made a meditative carpet from folk and jazz, blues and soul that it had never been heard before. In the course of his entire career-but above all on Seventies albums such as “Moondance” and “Veedon Fleece”-he hit this tone between ecstatic vision, natural intimacy and the organic flow of his music.
“The songs had a hypnotic quality,” he said when he had completely reproduced “Astral Weeks” on stage in 2008. “Even if I have developed as a songwriter, this quality has probably never been lost. In this respect, one can really speak of Astral Decades.”
Peter Wolf about van Morrison
“Van lived in a tiny apartment on the ground floor of an old house in the Green Street in Cambridge. He, his wife and her little son. They were completely broke. The apartment seemed dreary, bald, they only had a mattress on the floor, a fridge, an acoustic guitar and a tape. A legal way out of the misery.
Whenever Van had to make calls for professional reasons, he ran a few blocks far to me. I think that for him was always a little escape from his problem -laden life. For hours he rummaged in my record collection. Again and again we listened to “the gospel”, as he called it, from Jackie Wilson, Hank Williams, Louis Jordan, Billy Stewart, Elvis and John Lee Hooker. “These are the real experts,” said van. Gene Chandler’s live version of “Rainbow ’65” put on so often that I had to buy a new needle for my turntable.
We looked at all sorts of clubs, evening for evening, but hardly anyone knew van. Sometimes he came to my band’s gigs. Once when we played the intro for his song “Gloria”, I called him onto the stage. He adorned himself, but then he came and put on a brilliant appearance. Unfortunately, the audience did not like that such a “unknown” singer simply turned off a familiar song. “