Van Morrison
Generally known as Van Morrison, is a singer-songwriter from Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
I've never been comfortable working live, and I'm still not. I was always more music-oriented and less star-oriented, which is why I've never been comfortable on big stages in big halls.
They asked me to come to New York to help celebrate Van's induction into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame. I went because I see Van as one of the cats that has kept the faith. Like me, he's always himself — he stays true to the music that means the most to him. It meant a lot to sing "Crazy Love" on stage that evening.
Into the Music was about the first album where I felt, 'I'm starting here'...the Wavelength thing, I didn't really feel that was me.
Van Morrison should be friggin' canonized.
When I was fifteen, I became a professional musician. I got involved with people and did certain things which led me to start making records and touring. And leaving Belfast and going to London and America, one thing led to another and I got caught up in the life that I'm living now...I was very young and i followed something. (1993)
He has this great poetic and fantastic voice and what I love about Van, and what I forget to do sometimes is, well I can tell when Van is just like drifting into sort of a zone he just drifts into a place where the whole world is shut out and you can tell that he's in that spot. It's almost a dream-like, trance-like state, singing sometimes. That's really what music is all about. It's almost a jazz concept if you know what I mean — you just kinda go out and you're just wingin' it and I love that about Van, he will risk that, he will go on and on and on and he won't fade the ending before the magic happens, as it were.
Where I feel this has cost me is in the personality situation, where you're expected to be a personality. You not only have to write and record, but you have to go out and sell it. Well, I'm not a salesman, and I'm very bad at selling things. If I had to do that for a living, I'd probably be completely broke. I can't sell myself. And I don't even want to. That's something that's not going to change.
He extends himself only to express himself. Alone among rock's great figures — and even in that company he is one of the greatest — Morrison is adamantly inward. And unique. Although he freely crosses musical boundaries —R. and B., Celtic melodies, jazz, rave-up rock, hymns, down-and-dirty blues — he can unfailingly be found in the same strange place: on his own wavelength.
Van Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music.
There is one thing I don't understand about Astral Weeks. Of all the records I have ever made that one is definitely not rock. You could throw that record at the wall, take it to music colleges, analyze it to death. Nobody is going to tell me that it is a rock album. Why they keep calling it one I have no idea.
Like I say, the way I write songs is, you know, inspirational. I have to wait for it to happen. And when it happens I get lines, and I just write them down, you know. I'm not sort of a Tin Pan Alley sort of songwriter. I just sort of write down what I get - without censoring or questioning what it is and what it means, you know. Like later on I look at what it means, but not at the time.
The odd time something happens and you go into some kind of enchantment (on stage). But you have to work very hard to get that. Most of the time you're just playing and singing the songs, and there's no guarantee that you are going to get anywhere....
There was a definite charisma when Van performed. Van always had something about him. Whether you liked it or not, you could never take away from the fact that he was different from all other human beings, and here he is today, still being different.
People think I'm eccentric, cranky. If I'm eccentric because I've never been into mainstream things, then I am eccentric.
I don't think I will ever mellow out. I think if you mellow out, you get eaten up. You become like a commodity. So I don't think I will mellow out. It is not in my blood.
The people I was listening to never sold a lot of records. John Lee Hooker was never on the charts, so I was never in it from a commercial point of view. Other people expected things from my records, but I never did.
I love Van Morrison because he always seems to be searching, never found. I don't know about his personal life but in his music he gives the listener only a question. The answer lies elsewhere to be attained someday.
Morrison remains a singer who can be compared to no other performer in the history of rock 'n' roll, a singer who can not be pinned down, dismissed or fitted into anyone's expectations. He is a conundrum.
With Moondance, I wrote the melody first. I played the melody on a soprano sax and I knew I had a song so I wrote lyrics to go with the melody. That's the way I wrote that one. I don't really have any words to particularly describe the song, sophisticated is probably the word I'm looking for. For me, Moondance is a sophisticated song. Frank Sinatra wouldn't be out of place singing that.