Been listening to a lot of Van Morrison recently.

Thoughts:

1) Astral Weeks is a pretty magnificent record. I don't know if it just came down to wrong time and place, but I think I tried giving this a listen a couple years ago and it didn't register at all. I was wrong, you see.

It's hard to describe, but the songs themselves aren't really impressive on paper. Starts off with acoustic strumming, a couple verses... and then it's just a bunch of improvisation. But I don't know what happened with these sessions, but it works... amazingly. There's this impressive amount of space that allows everything to develop organically and beautifully, and by the end you're not sure what exactly it is that is so affective, but nonetheless it is.

I am, however a sucker for nice string arrangements.

(This song is about 3 minutes too long, but screw it.)



2) His next album Moondance is almost as good.

It's really weird. I knew I've heard a lot of these songs many, many times. But what I didn't anticipate is that I'm pretty sure I've heard every single one of these songs on a radio multiple times before. Maybe it's one of those albums--like Boston's self titled debut--that is both strong throughout and in line with the typical classic rock sound that they throw every song into their rotation.

It's not bad. I mean, I've heard Moondance a million times, and Caravan, And It Stoned Me, and Into The Mystic hundreds of times. And the songs I haven't heard hundreds of times... feel as if I have. But I guess somehow they sound a little fresh compiled in a nice, cohesive album format. I don't know.



3) As much as I love these two albums... I love stupid and silly crap even more. So... the next song might make me happier than any other song.



This is from Van Morrison's contractual obligation album, wherein right before releasing Astral Weeks he went into a record studio and tossed off 31 songs in about 31 minutes in order to settle a dispute with his record company. It was never released.

Song titles include "Want A Danish," "You Say France And I Whistle," "Hold On George," "Here Comes Dumb George," "Goodbye George," "Dum Dum George," "Blow In Your Nose," and "Nose In Your Blow." It's pretty great. And by that, I mean "I derive a lot of enjoyment out of it, although I'm certain that most everyone definitely would not."