When Van Morrison last released an album of original songs, during the Covid pandemic, it didn’t go down well. Indeed for many, 2022’s What’s It Gonna Take squats in Morrison’s catalogue like a toad in a fruit salad.
“A self-absorbed descent into Covid lunacy” one critic opined. Well, we’ve all been there, dear, but here we are now, out on the other side, blinking into the blinding lights of incendiary wars, mechanically rendered intelligences and toxic substances masquerading as world leaders. It’s not a place for dreams and visions, but here’s Van Morrison, just shy of 80, bringing us a new album of original songs that dwell in that sweet spot where dreams and visions form.
It’s led off by the lead single, “Down to Joy”, a sprightly fountainhead of a tune that releases a songbird in the heart. It’s warming and uplifting, it does the kind of things that Van Morrison songs did in the late 1970s and on those poetically charged 1980s albums. It doesn’t reach their heights, maybe, but it gets some way there, and in 2025, that’s an achievement. One up for humanity.
“If It Wasn’t for Ray” is a bouncy, Hammond-fuelled paean to the great singer, while “Haven’t Lost my Sense of Wonder” harks back to his excellent 1984 album. “Cutting Corners” is one of three songs written with Don Black, and while it is ebullient musically, it’s scored with a sense of loss, and has a typically potent fiddle part from the great English folk artist Seth Lakeman. “Back to Writing Love Songs” does what it says on the tin, with an added surge of strings, and the six-piece Fews Ensemble extend their stringwork from here through to the lyrical candour of “The Only Love I Ever Need is Yours”.
“Old Stomping Ground” has our man back on the streets of Belfast, blowing his horn (as does the title song, “Remembering Now”), while Hammond organ and strings light up a splendid immersion in the spirit of nature exulted in across “Memories and Visions”. Seth Lakeman, meanwhile, reprises his fiddle on set highlight “When the Rains Came”. Its title is a nod to a line from “Brown Eyed Girl”, and with its hypnotic, incantatory spirit and Van’s wordless vocals spiralling out of its centre, what we have here is a Van Morrison classic. Again. One up for humanity.
In short, while it may not break new ground there’s not a bad song here, and there are a handful of tunes that look set to grow into long-term keepers, including the nine-minute “Stretching Out” that closes and seals the set. He’s playing with Neil Young at Hyde Park in July, and there are two 80th-birthday concerts at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall at the end of August. Let’s see how many of these new ones he cues up. The world’s a better place with singers like Van, and with albums like these spinning in it.
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