How does the mystic feel about this? (hur hur)

Van Morrison - Into The Mystic

No video, as they didn't exist in those days. The best i could find on youtube were some halfass cover versions which don't exactly do it justice.

From Bowie's upbeat boogie to an entirely different can of worms - Van Morrison's Celt-spriritual folk blues. I want to hate this. I tend to hate anything that has any kind of spiritual pretense and this should be crying out for ridicule - it's folky, it's made by a short, fat Irishman and it's intentionally spiritual music. But annoyingly it's rather good, entirely due to Morrison's baritone - at times plaintive but always drenched in soul. This mix of his voice, spirit and Belfast roots has been referred to as Morrison's 'yarrrrragh' - his uniquely Irish synthesis of Leadbelly, jazz, blues and poetry. And it's on show on Into The Mystic in a gigantic way. As much as you may want to dismiss Morrison for his more poppy output, songs like Into The Mystic make a lot of the songs that I've listened to during this process sound artificial and manufactured. (Ironically enough, it seems like evn Morrison wasn't sure about the lyrics - he tinkered with them a lot during the process of writing them, but could never decide on, for example, whether the first line would be "We were born into the wind" or "we were borne into the wind".)

Which is a scary realisation. It's Van Morrison, god damn it. The author of a song that taunted me throughout my youth - a song that I despised: Brown Eyed Girl. I feel conflicted.

Back to the song, which begins with two tracks of folky guitar and Morrison's voice at roughly half volume and emotion. At this point you can understand why, according to a BBC survey, this song’s soothing, soulful vibe makes it one of the most popular songs for surgeons to listen to whilst performing operations (better that than, say, Cannibal Corpse, I suppose). During the first verse it's pretty ballad-y and not really anything special, but then he starts humming a little, the volume rises and you can hear the emotion build. A hint of strings, a hint of brass, Morrison goes full bore and *whoah* you didn't see that one coming..

In conclusion, listen to it. It's suprisingly excellent. Unless, of course, you've been hip enough to listen to Morrison all the years, in which case you're probably thinking "told you so". And I deserve it. I will be going out to buy Moondance very soon. Also, at some point we'll get to Gloria by Them, Morrison's first band, which will, if you haven't heard it before, blow.. your.. mind.

Verdict: If I were a pirate, I'd be saying "Yarrrrrrr(agh)!"

Tomorrow: LaBelle - Lady Marmalade