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,...

It's paradoxical that "Astral Weeks", Van Morrison's best and most enduring album, should be unrepresentative of his general body of music; as is in fact that his reputation was not truly established until his second album for Warner Brothers, "Moondance", which set the course for a succession of records, generally excellent and sometimes more, in an R&B-cum-jazz mode that was markedly different from "Astral Weeks". Of all subsequent albums, only h...

Like the white middle class it entertains, rock music exhibits a certain rootlessness, a lack of a living history. This is rock's greatest asset—it is spontaneous and free, contemporary and temporary—but it can also be a liability. The ever-recurrent rock revivals and our fondness for golden oldies express the absence of a past, the very word "revival" indicating that the past is dead. Many artists are exploring that past, but the then and the now are so disjunct that more...

People had started talking about Van Morrison in the past tense. In the three years since his last album release [Veedon Fleece] his presence had grown to become some vaguely attainable level of excellence it seemed no one, not even Morrison himself, could ever truly achieve, or had ever truly achieved. Bruce Springsteen acknowledged him and Graham Parker took his rough edges as a persona. His albums, grown familiar after so many years of constant play, were beginning to be referred to as classics and, as h...

Sometimes, in moments of bewilderment or happiness, you may catch yourself singing or whistling a song whose words, on reflection, explain how things really are with you—"Good Day Sunshine" when it's raining, "Rain" when it's sunny, "Hello Goodbye" when you don't know whether to stay or go. In all kinds of weather and situations, the song interprets you…. To the sound of the slow-motion footfall of acoustic guitar and bass, Van Mor...

Van Morrison, I've been thinking lately, is the intellectual's Grateful Dead. They offer an amplified nirvana, fueled by chemicals; he offers the dark night, fueled by despair, self-pity, ennui. In either case it is easy to listen, but I'm beginning to wonder why anyone should want to. I would like to find something nice to say about Hard Nose the Highway,… but that would be silly. It was a bad record. [Veedon Fleece] is not. It is a boring one, and in a way, I think bad records ...

Van Morrison is an enigmatic figure. Although he practices the art of a flamboyant soul trouper, he maintains an oddly detached, awkward stage presence. His vision is hermetic, his energy implosive; yet his vocation is public. These are curious contradictions for a performer to sustain, but they help lend Morrison's art its resonance. His distinction lies in his fusion of a visceral intensity with an introspective lyric style—a potentially powerful amalgam owing as much to Bobby Bland as Bob D...

[In compiling "Them, Featuring Van Morrison Lead Singer", Nick] Tauber has had a relatively easy task in selecting essentially from the two albums that Van made with Them—he's got all the accepted classics like "Gloria," "Here Comes The Night" and "Mystic Eyes"—but he's also come up with a number called "Hey Girl," totally new to me, whose pastoral lyricism is quite unlike the rawness of the rest of the materia...