Астралдық апталар: Ван Моррисонның альбомы

1968 studio album by Van Morrison

Astral Weeks is the second studio album by Northern Irish singer songwriter Van Morrison. It was recorded at Century Sound Studios in New York during September and October 1968, and released in November of the same year by Warner Bros. Records. The album's music blends folk, blues, jazz, and classical styles, signalling a radical departure from the sound of Morrison's previous pop hits, such as "Brown Eyed Girl" (1967). The lyrics and cover art portray the symbolism equating earthly love and heaven that would often feature in the singer's subsequent records. His lyrics have been described as impressionistic, hypnotic, and modernist, while the record has been categorized as a song cycle or concept album. Astral Weeks did not originally receive promotion from Morrison's record label and was not an immediate success with consumers or critics. Its standing eventually improved greatly, with praise given to Morrison's singing, arrangements and songwriting, and the album has been viewed as one of rock music's greatest and most important records (a reputation the singer himself has dismissed). It was placed on numerous widely circulated lists of the best albums of all time and has had an enduring effect on both listeners and musicians. Forty years after the album's release, Morrison performed all eight of its songs live for the first time at two Hollywood Bowl concerts in November 2008; this performance was later released as Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl.

Astral Weeks has poetic, stream of consciousness lyrics that evoke emotions and images instead of coherent, intellectual ideas and narratives. According to Guy Raz from NPR, it is a folk rock album, "perhaps the seminal album of the folk rock genre", while the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame online biography of Morrison said its music is trance like folk jazz set to "impressionistic, free flowing" lyrics. AllMusic's William Ruhlmann, on the other hand, viewed the music as an amalgam of folk, blues, jazz, and classical music that is unlike rock. Although usually described as a song cycle rather than a concept album, the songs do, when considered in their totality, seem to link together as one long song, forming an "intangible narrative of unreachable worlds" and delivered with what one writer calls "a masterpiece of virtuoso singing". According to Charlie Gillett, the album has meditative songs that combine themes of nostalgia, drama, and Morrison's personal mysticism and are performed in a blue eyed soul style. The album embraces a form of symbolism that would eventually become a staple of Morrison's songs, equating earthly love and heaven, or as close as a living being can approach it. Morrison and Davis's upright bass can be interpreted as the earth opposing Kay's percussion and the string arrangement representing heaven and with Berliner's lead acoustic guitar residing on a plane in between. Van Morrison told Ritchie Yorke, one of his biographers, he wrote both of the songs "Madame George" and "Cyprus Avenue" in stream of consciousness: "['Madame George'] just came right out  The song is just a stream of consciousness thing, as is 'Cyprus Avenue'  I didn't even think about what I was writing." In an interview with Paste in 2009, Morrison said the songs on Astral Weeks were written "prior to 1968 over a period of five years". In an NPR review he comments: "It's not about me. It's totally fictional. It's put together of composites, of conversations I heard—you know, things I saw in movies, newspapers, books, whatever. It comes out as stories. That's it. There's no more."

The song "Astral Weeks" opens the album with the lines "If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream/ Where immobile steel rims crack, and the ditch in the back roads stop", which according to Erik Hage shows that Morrison had "once and for all pulled neck and neck with Dylan as a lyricist". Morrison described it as "one of those songs where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel  I don't think I can elaborate on it any more than that." The words in the song: "Talkin' to Huddie Ledbetter/Showin' pictures on the wall" appear to be based on Morrison's real life custom of carrying around a poster of Lead Belly and hanging it on the wall wherever he lived. (This was revealed in a Rolling Stone interview in 1978.) Morrison described it as "the kind of song that you'd sing to a kid or somebody that you love. It's basically a love song. It's just a song about being spiritually beside somebody." It was originally recorded for Bang Records in December 1967. That first recording shows the pop music intentions of Bert Berns which give it a different sound from the Astral Weeks recording. Paul Du Noyer wrote, "Sweet Thing puts the singer in a hazy, pastoral paradise where he wanders in 'gardens wet with rain', or counts the stars in his lover's eyes, and vows to 'never grow so old again' or 'read between the lines'. He pleads with his mind to keep quiet, so his heart can hear itself think. He yearns to obliterate experience and rediscover innocence." It has been a more popular cover song than any of the others on the album.

The song "Cyprus Avenue" is a three chord blues composition and served for many years as the closing song for most of Morrison's live shows. Along with "Madame George", it is the centerpiece of the album and both songs are Belfast related and highly impressionistic. The song is told from the point of view of an outsider watching from inside an automobile and getting tongue tied as the refined school girl he fantasizes about appears and he imagines her a fine lady with "rainbow ribbons in her hair" in a carriage drawn by six white horses and "returning from a fair". Van Morrison described Cyprus Avenue as "a street in Belfast, a place where there's a lot of wealth. It wasn't far from where I was brought up and it was a very different scene. To me it was a very mystical place. It was a whole avenue lined with trees and I found it a place where I could think."

"The Way Young Lovers Do" is described by Clinton Heylin as a "lounge jazz" sound that "still sticks out like Spumante at a champagne buffet". In his review for Rolling Stone, Greil Marcus also spoke of the song as a "poor jazz flavored cut that, is uncomfortably out of place on this record". Brian Hinton describes it as there being "a Sinatra strut to Van's voice, a blues knowingness with Stax brass, and a string section which swirls where previously it drifted." He describes it as "about growing up, an adolescent first kiss".

Called the other album masterpiece (along with Cyprus Avenue), "Madame George" is almost ten minutes long and tells of the mysterious madame "in a corner playing dominoes in drag", among other things. It also has a setting of Cyprus Avenue in Belfast with impressionistic lyrics that give stream of conscious details that are seemingly unrelated. Erik Hage describes the effect of the sensory experience of the lyrics, the instrumentation and Morrison's impassioned vocals on the listener and the album as being "like some kind of twilight state between sleeping and wakefulness", engaging the listener to project themselves into the spell of the song. Rolling Stone album reviewer wrote: "The crowning touch is 'Madame George', a cryptic character study that may or may not be about an aging transvestite but that is certainly as heartbreaking a reverie as you will find in pop music." Morrison has denied that the song is about a transvestite, as others, including Lester Bangs, have believed. The original title of the song is "Madame Joy" and Morrison later changed the title although he actually sings the words "Madame Joy" in the song. An earlier recording for Bang Records with slightly altered lyrics, backing singers, a much swifter tempo and a "bizarrely inappropriate party atmosphere" had a considerably different tone from the 1968 Astral Weeks recording.

The oldest composition on Astral Weeks is "Ballerina", which Morrison composed in 1966 while still a member of Them, around the same time he first met his future wife, Janet. Inspired by "a flash about an actress in an opera house appearing in a ballet" (according to Morrison), former Them guitarist Jim Armstrong recalls the band working on the song between engagements. "[Morrison] had all these words", Armstrong says, "we sort of formalized it, 'cause there was no structure to it". Them performed the song one night in Hawaii, but it was not recorded until Astral Weeks. On the full length version of "Ballerina" which first appeared on the 2015 expanded edition, the left and right audio channels are opposite to those on the originally released edited version.

"Slim Slow Slider" is the only song on the album to not have string overdubs and according to John Payne, Morrison had not played it live before. Like in the song "T. B. Sheets", the singer tells of watching a young girl die, but in "Slim Slow Slider" the girl seems bent on her own self destruction: "I know you're dying, baby / I know you know it too." The song ends abruptly with the words, "Every time I see you, I just don't know what to do." It has been said to be about a drug addict, but Morrison has only said that it's about someone "who is caught up in a big city like London or maybe is on dope, I'm not sure."

According to Steve Turner, one of Van Morrison's biographers, Irish painter Cecil McCartney influenced the titling of Astral Weeks. Morrison related how "A friend of mine had drawings in his flat of astral projection. I was at his house when I was working on a song which began, 'If I venture down the slipstream' and that's why I called it 'Astral Weeks'." "It was a painting", McCartney corrects. "There were several paintings in the studio at the time. Van looked at the painting and it suggested astral travelling to him." The album cover photograph of Van Morrison was taken by Joel Brodsky, best known for his "Young Lions" photoshoot with Jim Morrison. The squared circle in the cover photo is described as portraying "the mystic symbol of the union of opposites; the sacred marriage of heaven and earth". The album became a somewhat popular cult import in the United States, while in the United Kingdom it was largely overlooked by critics. In NME, Nick Logan regarded it as a pale imitation of the guitarist José Feliciano's 1968 Feliciano! album, which was one of the year's best selling records. With the exception of Astral Weeks title track, Logan felt the compositions were indistinguishable and "suffer from being stuck in the same groove throughout". In the American magazine Stereo Review, editor Peter Reilly panned it as a "free verse mind bender of an album", plagued by nonsensical lyrics and incoherent singing from Morrison, especially on "Madame George". In 1969, Greil Marcus reviewed the album positively in Rolling Stone, saying that Morrison's lyrics were thoughtful and deeply intellectual, "in terms of the myths and metaphors that exist within the world of rock and roll". He believed both the music and lyrics captured the spirit of Bob Dylan's 1967 album John Wesley Harding, while calling Astral Weeks a "unique and timeless" record. Rolling Stone later named it the album of the year. Melody Maker also called it one of the year's best records, featuring Morrison's "small harsh voice" backed by an attractive musical combo that "verges on genius" during "Madame George".

Astral Weeks critical standing improved greatly over time. It became viewed as one of rock's greatest records and a culturally significant work. According to Rob Sheffield, it was Morrison's "most beautiful and intense album", the foundation for his "legend" and a work that continues to captivate musicians and listeners. Lester Bangs said its anguished feeling resonated with him on first listen, calling it "the rock record with the most significance in my life so far  a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend." Irish musician Glen Hansard said it made him think about life with a greater depth of feeling, "with a greater sense of fear and horror and desire than you ever imagined." According to writer Steve Turner, the album also became popular with travelers of the hippie trail, "from Europe through to Kathmandu and there were even reports of vans painted in psychedelic colours being renamed 'the Van Morrison'." In his 1975 book, Ritchie Yorke wrote "It was almost as if Van Morrison, elusive at any time, had deliberately created an album of music which would indefinitely withstand the vulgarity of music industry image making. Later they might say that other albums were reminiscent of Astral Weeks, but they could never claim that Astral Weeks was like anything else." According to Greil Marcus, Martin Scorsese said that the first fifteen minutes of his 1976 film Taxi Driver was based on Astral Weeks. The critical recognition and renown of Astral Weeks came to overshadow Morrison's subsequent work, According to biographer Johnny Rogan, his recording career was "all too often crystallized in a single moment. Like the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks was perceived as a one off whose critical standing allowed little discussion for other equally fascinating musical forays that followed." Merenstein, on the other hand, still admires the album: "To this day it gives me pain to hear it. Pain is the wrong word—I'm so moved by it." Music historian Andrew Ford said the album's commercial performance, much like its musical aesthetic, is similar to classical music: "Neither instant nor evanescent: Astral Weeks will sell as many copies this year as it did in 1968 and has every year in between". Astral Weeks has appeared in all time best album polls worldwide. In 1978, it was voted the fourth best album of all time in Paul Gambaccini's poll of 50 prominent American and English rock critics. It was also ranked second greatest by Mojo in 1995, and third by The Times. In 2003, it was ranked number 19 by Rolling Stone on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, maintaining the rating in a 2012 revision and dropping to number 60 in the 2020 reboot of the list. In 1998, it was voted the ninth greatest album of all time in a "Music of the Millennium" poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4 and The Guardian. In 2000, Q placed the record at number six on its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. Time included Astral Weeks in its 2006 list of the "All Time 100 Albums". When Astral Weeks was voted the best Irish album of all time in 2009, Niall Stokes wrote in Hot Press, "It's an extraordinary work, packed with marvelously evocative songs that are rooted in Belfast but which deliver a powerful and lasting universal poetic resonance." It ranked number 16 in the 2000 third edition of Colin Larkin's All Time Top 1000 Albums. Marcus referred to the impact of the album, calling it a "common language", and related in a 2009 interview that "I was so shocked when I was teaching a seminar at Princeton just a couple years ago, and out of 16 students, four of them said their favorite album was Astral Weeks." Marcus goes on to say, "Now, how did it enter their lives? We're talking about an album that was recorded well before they were born, and yet it spoke to them. They understood its language as soon as they heard it." Johnny Depp, in a Rolling Stone interview in 2008, recalled how when he was a preteen his older brother (by ten years), tiring of Johnny's favourite music of the time said, Try this.' And he put on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks. And it stirred me. I'd never heard anything like it." Joan Armatrading has said that Astral Weeks was the first album she purchased as a teenager and that it opened her up musically. In August 2010, director and choreographer, Jessica Wallenfels, staged a production in Portland, Oregon, of a rock opera/story ballet of Astral Weeks called Find me Beside You.

In November 2008, Van Morrison performed two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California playing the entire Astral Weeks album. The band featured Jay Berliner, who played on the original album. Morrison toured performing the album live throughout most of 2009, with Rolling Stone calling these concerts "some of the most inspired performances of his whole career". A live album entitled Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl was released by Morrison's record label, Listen to the Lion, on 24 February 2009. It was also issued as a double vinyl LP album released the same date. A DVD featuring the Hollywood Bowl performances and entitled Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film was released on 19 May 2009. When asked by Rolling Stone editor David Wild why he was performing the album again live after forty years, Morrison replied: "It received no promotion, from Warner Bros.—that's why I never got to play the songs live. I had always wanted to play the record live and fully orchestrated—that is what this is all about. I always like live recording and I like listening to live records too. I'm not too fond of being in a studio—it's too contrived and too confining. I like the freedom of live, in the moment sound." On 30 October 2015, the album remastered was reissued by Warner Bros. Records with four session bonus tracks, including the full length versions of both "Ballerina" and "Slim Slow Slider".