Van Morrison is one of the most gifted singers, performers, composers, and songwriters in the history of popular music. Born August 31, 1945 in Belfast (Northern Ireland), Van Morrison (real name: George Ivan Morrison) left school at age 15 to join the...

George Ivan Morrison OBE (generally known as Van Morrison) (born August 31, 1945) is a Grammy Award-winning Northern Irish singer, songwriter, author, poet and multi-instrumentalist, who has been a professional musician since the late 1950s. He plays a...

Joel Brodsky, whose photography was featured on hundreds of music album covers, has died at age 67, his daughter said.Brodsky died March 1 in Stamford of a heart attack, his daughter, Jill Holt, said Saturday. He had moved to Connecticut about five years ago from...

Was it live ... or was it just a stunt for YouTube?A one-time college couple say their melodramatic Valentine's Day breakup _ complete with singers, hundreds of spectators and a profanity-laced tirade _ was real. Those who were there say it all seemed a little...

Today is Friday, Aug. 31, the 243rd day of 2007. There are 122 days left in the year.Today's Highlight in History:On Aug. 31, 1886, an earthquake rocked Charleston, S.C., killing 60 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.On this date:In 1881, the first U.S. tennis...

Forget everything you think you know about the movie musical, one of the more tried-and-true and utterly predictable genres around.With "Once," writer-director John Carney deconstructs it and reinvents it as something wholly new, inspired and alive.He also breathes fresh life into the idea of screen...

Van Morrison has an extraordinary knack for inventing brick walls to butt his head against, whereas anybody else would just walk right through. If an explanation were asked for, Morrison, resting between blows, would most likely answer: "Because it's there." This artist has staked his whole career on a wrestle with the unnamable. And unless you're sympathetic to such obsessions from the start, he can be a closed book—seemingly obscure, willful, often portentous, humorlessl...

Who has not been waiting for the next great Van Morrison LP? Whether you thought his last masterpiece was Veedon Fleece or Tupelo Honey or even (what I think) Moondance, you certainly were never prepared to write him off. Nobody's going to write him off because of Wavelength either, but it's obviously not the album he is still destined to make. Something comes clear here. Ever since Moondance, Van Morrison has staked his claim to the rare title "poet," mostly on the basis of what...

After Tupelo Honey Van Morrison must have been faced with a choice. He could continue with his domestic tranquility myth, which was as artistically false as it might have been literally true, or he could head for new turf. He has chosen the latter course (wisely I think). If the result is more curious than classic, perhaps that is the price of adventure. There are strands of nearly every kind of music Van Morrison has ever made in [St. Dominic's Preview]. It is short on the darkness and fire of Them,...