I’ve been meaning to do this blog post for a while. It’s kind of funny, it was actually originally intended to be my second blog post, but somehow as more and more posts came up it kept getting postponed. I had actually got to the point where I started to worry if I’d ever get around to doing it. It appears, however, that not getting around to it will no longer be a problem, since I’m posting it right now.
Anyway this post is about the Van Morrison album Astral Weeks. It’s easily one of my favorite albums of all time. I’m pretty sure it even makes my top five list. I’m not going to do a top five albums right now, just because I don’t really want to go and start thinking about it. I’ll leave that for another blog entry. Okay, so getting back on track, Astral Weeks is a perfect album. That is, of course, based on my opinion. There are other albums I think are perfect, Astral Weeks just happens to meet that same criteria.
It’s difficult to explain exactly what Astral Weeks is like to anyone who hasn’t listened to it. It’s sad, and beautiful, and happy, and epic all at the same time. In the end it is just an immensely powerful and emotional album.
Now I kind of feel like I have to back up a bit, because to most people when they think Van Morrison, they think Brown Eyed Girl. So just to be clear, Astral Weeks is nothing like that. Not even close. Don’t get me wrong Astral Weeks is in some ways pop-like, but it’s really a whole different animal. It’s not nearly as accessible to a main stream audience.
For arguments sake, lets take Van Morrison’s album Moondance which was released in 1970, two years after Astral Weeks. Moondance is a fantastic album. It’s the album that got me into Van Morrison. It’s much more poppy and probably a little bit closer to what people who only know Brown Eyed Girl would expect. Moondance is still a very powerful album. All the songs are great. It’s just, in my opinion, more of a song oriented album. Each song stands on its own and the listener feels a distinct division between songs, and can listen to any one song on the album by itself without listening to the rest.
After getting into Moondance, which happened immediately after I bought it. I was actually shocked by how much I liked Van Morrison. I was sort of upset with myself for not getting into him sooner. It was an eye opener. Anyway, probably a few weeks after that, I went out and bought Astral Weeks. The first time I put it on I couldn’t even make it though the whole thing. It wasn’t anything like Moondance and that really threw me off. It ended up taking me quite sometime to get into it. I guess one thing that helped was when I borrowed my copy of Moondance to a friend of mine and she decided she was never going to return it. In fact she is still in possession of that copy, and I have since replaced it.
Getting back on track, once I did get into Astral Weeks I discovered that I liked it a great deal more then Moondance. (Again I’m not trying to down play how good Moondance is. That album is killer, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get into Van Morrison and isn’t sure what to get first. Get Moondance first, trust me.) I found that Astral Weeks worked as an album, all the songs are great, but what really makes them great is the way they are sequenced. The album just unfolds. It’s a masterpiece. When I listen to it, it feels like it’s a musical summary of a life or a relationship. It’s just extremely powerful. I kind of wanted to do a break down of each track, but after kind of trying I decided that there was no way I could really do them justice. So if you want to hear what they’re like you’re just going to have to go out and find yourself a copy. I will say this though; keep in mind it can take a little while to get into. The album is very heavy, not in today’s sense of what heavy is, but in the sense that the arrangement is very thick. There’s so much going on at first that it can be hard to take it all in. Once you do however, you’ll get lost in the melody and find yourself picking new thing out of the mix even after over 100 listenings. Each time you find something new you’ll find something new to love about it.
There’s also a bunch of other stuff Van Morrison has put out that’s great too, Wild Night for example. And of course there's Gloria, Which has to be one of the ten best rock and roll songs of all time.
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