The yang to Astral Weeks' yin, the brilliant Moondance is every bit as much a classic as its predecessor; Van Morrison's first commercially successful solo effort, it retains the previous album's deeply spiritual thrust but transcends its bleak, cathartic intensity to instead explore themes of renewal and redemption. Light, soulful, and jazzy, ...
Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history. For all that renown, Astral Weeks is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album: in fact, it isn't a rock & roll album at all. Employing a mixture of folk, blues, jazz, and classical music, Van Morrison spins out a series of extended ruminations on his Belfast ...
Keep It Simple is a mantra for Van Morrison, as he stripped his music down to the bare basics years ago and then comfortably rode that groove, comprised in equal parts of blues, soul, jazz, and country. Van has been riding this groove so long that it's hard to pinpoint exactly when he settled into it, but looking back, things started to shift in ...
There are 21 cuts on this Hip-O collection of Van Morrison's Greatest Hits. The interesting thing is that of these 21 cuts, only about half of them will be recognizable to the casual Van Morrison fan, as they come from his Bang sides and the far more popular Warner Brothers singles of the early '70s. As it should be, although there is one glaring ...
For an artist who's doggedly album-oriented, plus a songwriter who revels in subtlety, Van Morrison doesn't seem like a logical candidate for a successful greatest-hits compilation. Nevertheless, The Best of Van Morrison is a crackerjack compilation, tracing Van the Man from his days with Them, through his best-known tunes ("Brown-Eyed Girl," ...
The soundtrack to Michael features a few angel-themed hits scattered amongst traditional hits by Don Henley, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Al Green, the Mavericks, Van Morrison. ~ Keith Farley, All Music Guide
Into the Music may not seem like a great Van Morrison record, one of his very best, upon first listen, especially if you're trying to compare it to such masterpieces as Astral Weeks and Moondance, or even Tupelo Honey. Yet this is certainly one of his best records, one that is quietly winning and thoroughly ingratiating, sounding stronger, even ...
Van Morrison's music has always been evocative of time, place, and a range of emotions, so it's natural that many a film director has chosen his songs for soundtrack purposes. This collection of 19 Morrison recordings that have been placed either prominently or subliminally in films spans his career, from his earliest sides with Them ("Gloria," ...
Beautiful Vision shares much sonically with its predecessor, Common One, being heavy on long, winding song-poems, moderate tempos, dense lyricism, and dated production. Still, this winds up being a stronger articulation of what Morrison was attempting to do on Common One -- much like how Wavelength got A Period of Transition right. That doesn't ...
Pay the Devil, an album-long foray into country music, shouldn't come as a surprise to Van Morrison fans. It's a logical extension of his love affair with American music. Certainly blues, R&B, soul, and jazz have been at the forefront, but one can go all the way back to the Bang years and find "Joe Harper Saturday Morning," or songs on Tupelo ...
While Van Morrison is, to be kind, an erratic and temperamental live performer, he's in stellar form throughout the double album It's Too Late to Stop Now, a superb concert set that neatly summarizes his career from his days with Them (represented by scorching renditions of "Gloria" and "Here Comes the Night") through 1973's Hard Nose the Highway ...
Van Morrison stopped having hits long before the release of the second volume of The Best of Van Morrison in 1993, so it's not practical to assume that it's double-disc successor -- delivered a whopping 14 years later, compared to the three separating the first two volumes -- has songs that are familiar to a general audience. Nor should it be ...
After the brilliant one-two punch of Astral Weeks and Moondance, His Band and the Street Choir brings Van Morrison back down to earth, both literally and figuratively. While neither as innovative nor as edgy as its predecessors, His Band and the Street Choir also lacks their overt mysticism; at heart, the album is simply Morrison's valentine to ...
Tupelo Honey is typical of Van Morrison's early-'70s work in both sound and structure; after dispensing with the requisite hit -- here, the buoyant, R&B-inflected "Wild Night" -- he truly gets down to business, settling into a luminously pastoral drift typified by the nostalgic "Old Old Woodstock." At the heart of the record are a pair of stunning ...
Anyone who's followed Van Morrison's career knows that Sony has the rights to the recordings he made for Bang -- in other words, one album plus outtakes. Since part of the reason the Super Hits series is such a success for the label is that they stick to what's in the vaults -- it cuts their costs considerably to rely on what they already own -- ...
Although he has made his name in pop music, singer Van Morrison has long enjoyed jazz, particularly the singing and lyrics of Mose Allison (for whom he had previously organized a recorded tribute). This particular release finds Morrison teaming up with singer Georgie Fame (who also plays organ) and a top-notch group of mostly British jazzmen ...
David Letterman's The Late Show always had a long tradition of excellent musical performances -- indeed, it's one of the few places on American network television where live music thrives -- so the question that surrounds the 1997 release of Live on Letterman: Music from the Late Show isn't why, but why did it take so long? There have been enough ...
Magic Time is one of those rare, intermittent Van Morrison records that consciously offers a bird's eye view of everywhere he's been musically and weaves it all together into a heady brew. The last one was The Healing Game in 1997. He's made fine records since (Down the Road, Back on Top), but they've been focused on whatever Muse was pulling his ...
This is as curious a live album as exists in Van Morrison's voluminous catalog. It's a homecoming record in many ways, since Morrison went back home to live in Ireland shortly after this was released, after many years in the United States. Recorded in 1983 and released on Mercury in 1984, this is, in reality, a solid presentation of his "spiritual ...
This album was compiled by George and Olivia Harrison and released in 1990 to benefit Romanian orphans. It contains previously unreleased tracks by, among others, Eric Clapton, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, and the Traveling Wilburys. ~ Kenneth M. Cassidy, All Music Guide
Van Morrison was working through one of his greatest -- yet least appreciated -- creative periods when he made this album, one that burrows deeply into an introspective jazz-rooted spiritual groove. With Mark Isham's lonely muted trumpet up front, listeners are in the jazz world immediately with "Haunts of Ancient Peace," merging perfectly with ...
If the title didn't tip you off, the opening five-minute jazz instrumental "Spanish Steps" certainly reveals that Poetic Champions Compose is an art record. Of course, Van Morrison has been making art records since at least Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, perhaps Common One, so that shouldn't come as a surprise. What is a bit of a shock is that ...
Although it marks a decline from the astonishing run of five great albums Van Morrison had made from 1968 through 1972, Hard Nose the Highway is still a respectable, if uneven, effort, notably containing "Snow in San Anselmo" (which features the Oakland Symphony Chamber Chorus) and "Warm Love." Nevertheless, it marks the end of Morrison's greatest ...
This volume of Casey Kasem's America's Top Ten series focuses on the folk-tinged pop of the 1960s, drawing heavily from the perennial classics, but including a few "deep cuts" as well. There's defining material like the Byrds' timeless "Mr. Tambourine Man," "Get Together," from the Youngbloods, the youthful yearn of the Grass Roots' "Let's Live ...
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