Although it gives the illusion that it was written as a piece, several of its songs were composed years earlier ("Ballerina" dates from 1966, when Them recorded a prescient version of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue"), with Morrison recording two of the songs-"Beside You" and "Madame George"-for Bang Records during a day-long 1967 session designed to deliver all 36 songs he owed the label. All of which underscores its separateness, playing into the myths that Astral Weeks is a record out of time and place.īut even this, the most mystical album in the classic rock canon, has prosaic beginnings. Certainly, Astral Weeks seems to exist in a separate dimension from the rest of Van Morrison's catalog, its supple, soft-focus jazz-folk lacking the deeper R&B grooves of so many of his records, while its songs are often absent on compilations (tellingly, there's not a single song from it on the artist-endorsed 2007 compilation, Still on Top-The Greatest Hits). In a way, Morrison's occasional disregard for the record helped fuel its cult, suggesting he tapped into a vein that frightened even him (this is a common thread among cult albums, where audiences choose to live eternally within a few dark months of an artist's life see also Big Star's Third or Weezer's Pinkerton). Other singer/songwriters wound up using Astral Weeks as a primary text, either discovering their own voice in its viaducts or wallowing in its detours, but nobody has approached its soft, untethered spirituality, not even Van Morrison himself.
There's reason why both its creator and admirers so often call Astral Weeks poetry: it has its own internal language. Morrison doesn't dwell upon such sadness so much as he brushes upon them, a sensibility mirrored in his open-ended songs-compositions that largely evade traditional structure in favor of a boundless ballad, one stripped of story but following an interior emotional narrative. Rather, this music comes from the perspective of a young man realizing everything he has will erode, an awareness arriving while the wonder of life has yet to fade. Death flows through the album but doom doesn't cloud each moment. It is youthful and old, the first flowering of expanded consciousness, one not yet tarnished by either tragedy or cynicism but impeded by an encroaching sense of mortality. Generalized longing-for a lover or a friend, for a certain time or place, for a younger version of yourself-is one of the defining elements of Astral Weeks, an album where spirituality, mysticism, and death intertwine on a vast expanding plane. An undercurrent of melancholy desire runs through "Brown Eyed Girl"-Van pines for a moment as it's passing-and Astral Weeks brings that yearning to the forefront as it ventures into the slipstream of memories, dreams, and regret. Berns was determined to get the record on the charts because that's where the money was, so the single sounded peppier than its lyric, a disconnect Morrison later noted. Much of the ebullience of "Brown Eyed Girl" derives from its AM-radio friendly arrangement, a sound encouraged by Bert Berns, the head of Van's label Bang. Van Morrison released Astral Weeks in November 1968, not even 18 months after cracking the Billboard Top 10 with "Brown Eyed Girl".
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