![]() While the jazz musicians recruited for the session “more or less sat there and jammed” (drummer Connie Kay’s words), Morrison sang his songs of nature and grace, love and death and rebirth, and together they spun out an incomprehensible work of genius. Morrison had moved eons beyond “Brown Eyed Girl” when he went into New York’s Century Sound Studios in the fall of 1968. The album Van Morrison created in his early twenties has detonated in more psyches than thousands of better known works, but when its biggest fans try to explain its greatness, more often than not, their tongues get tied every time they try to speak. To paraphrase the singer of “Sweet Thing,” Astral Weeks is dynamite and we don’t know why. They understood its language as soon as they heard it. 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. 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. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is 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.
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