A venture in the slipstream: Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks turns fifty

There are few albums that seem to have a profound effect on not only its listeners but on fellow musicians as well. Bruce Springsteen said that it gave him “a sense of the divine.” It has been described as nearly perfect, transcendental, and is regarded as one of the best albums of all time. Exactly 50 years ago today, Van Morrison’s album Astral Weeks (1968) was released, and its impact on music continues to remain remarkable.

Astral Weeks was the second album recorded in-studio by Van Morrison, a singer-songwriter born in Pottinger, Ireland in 1945. Recorded at Century Sound Studios in New York in the fall of 1968, it was released by Warner Bros Records on November 29th the same year.

Astral Weeks was written following months of conflict and contention between Morrison and Bert Berns, a New York producer at BANG Records who released Morrison’s debut solo album Blowin’ Your Mind! in September of 1967. Berns, going against Morrison’s wishes, chose to release Blowin’ Your Mind! with psychedelic cover art, alluding to the drug culture of the 1960s that was becoming increasingly popular in music. Morrison, who saw himself as a writer and poet, felt like the aesthetic misrepresented him, resulting in a tense relationship between the two. Following months of arguments about royalties, Berns died of a heart attack in December, leaving Carmine DeNoia in charge of the label. Morrison faced further conflict with DeNoria, including a drunken night in which DeNoria struck Morrison with his guitar. Morrison eventually separated from BANG Records. In 1968 he married his girlfriend Janet Rigsbee and moved to Cambridge Massachusetts.

Astral Weeks was recorded in several sessions. Morrison wrote and rehearsed the songs in Boston and Cambridge, where he would often improvise for twenty minutes at a time, recording and then listening back to the tapes, allowing him to edit and refine the music. The album was then later recorded in New York with Morrison’s band which then consisted of bassist Tom Kielbania, drummer Joey Bebo, and flute player John Payne.

The album develops like a relationship, beginning with its expansive emotional depth and concluding with the ultimate anguish of the relationship’s demise. In only eight tracks, Morrison somehow compacts an entire scope of deep emotion. Astral Weeks is an album that deserves to be listened to in its entirety, as each song builds off of the previous and develops into a crescendo of emotional vulnerability in a way that is intimate and unexpected.

Much of Morrison’s writing, particularly exemplified in the opening track “Astral Weeks,” is stream of consciousness. He weaves an ephemeral blend of poetic prose and detailed descriptions of memories. In “Astral Weeks,” Morrison sings:

If I ventured in the slipstream

Between the viaducts of your dreams

Where immobile steel rims crack

And the ditch in the back roads stop

Could you find me

Would you kiss-a my eyes

Lay me down

In silence easy

To be born again

In these opening lines, Morrison prepares the listener for the journey of the rest of the album, a venture into the subconscious and into memories — memories that are both precious and painful.

At its core, Astral Weeks is a love story. Morrison met his fiance Janet in 1966 in California, and she served as his muse and creative partner during the creation of his future albums. Janet recorded lyrics for Morrison and helped him refine and edit his songs during the creation of Astral Weeks.

In “Beside You,” Morrison details the comforts of companionship. The relationship further develops in “Sweet Thing,” in which Morrison describes the naive passion of deep young love, writing that his “sweet thing” will make him “not remember that [he] even felt the pain” and that he will “never grow so old again.”  Finally, in a moment of grief, Morrison describes the relationships inevitable end in “Slim Slow Slider.” Morrison sings:

You’re out of reach…

You’re gone for something

And I know you won’t be back

I know you’re dying, baby

And I know you know it, too

Even in the albums moments of deep pain and loss, there is a balance to Morrison’s perspective. He describes the sadness with moments of tender fondness — conveying a level of emotional depth that is only achieved with time and wisdom. In “Madame George,” Morrison writes:

So cold, and as you’re about to leave

She jumps up and says, hey love, you forgot your gloves

And the gloves to love, to love the gloves

It is in these small details that Morrison conveys true intimacy. Although he has stated that the album was, “just impressions, basically, things people were saying,” the lyrics are poignant, dreamy and melodic, and each word serves a significant and essential purpose. Morrison’s descriptions of time and place make the lyrics feel incredibly specific, but the emotional capacity they hold in their simultaneous vagueness make them universal.

Upon its release, Astral Weeks did not achieve immediate commercial or critical success; Morrison’s record label did not even choose to promote the album. However, over time, it began to achieve a cult status as one of rock and roll’s greatest albums. Director Martin Scorsese has stated that the album inspired the first 15 minutes of his critically acclaimed film Taxi Driver (1976), Bruce Springsteen noted that his love for the album inspired him to hire Richard Davis to play the bass for his album Born to Run (1975), Elvis Costello and Joni Mitchell have expressed their love for the album, and in his Academy Award acceptance speech for Capote (2005) actor Philip Seymour Hoffman references “Madame George” stating, “I love, I love, I love, I love, I love. You know the Van Morrison song, I love, I love, I love, and he keeps repeating it like that?” A decade ago, forty years after its release, Morrison performed the album in its entirety at two Hollywood Bowl concerts.

Astral Weeks exists in a musical purgatory. The style is not exactly rock and roll, but rather a unique combination of jazz, folk, and blues. The lyrics are modernist, but the guitar is classical and traditional. Just like the technical elements of the album, the lyrics and narrative are defined by similar contradictions. Astral Weeks lives in the in-between parts of life: love and loss, memory and illusion, the conscious and subconscious. Maybe this is why Morrison says that “As far as I was concerned, [the album] just didn’t exist?” Much like a fleeting memory, there is uncertainty in the albums claims. Morrison doesn’t make any definite conclusions about love, but rather he chooses to explore the beauty of its indefinability. The final lyric of the album comes at the end of “Slim Slow Slider,” in which Morrison, in some ways, summarizes the inconclusiveness of life, simply singing, “I just don’t know what to do.”

Written by Madeline Rohner