1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 177. Van Morrison – Moondance (1970)

 

The best description of this album, and the style of music that is developing in the early Seventies, is that those who were hippies in the Sixties have now got married and settled down, and consequently this kind of radio-friendly folk/country/rock appeals to them, especially when coupled with Van Morrison’s lyrics about finding joy in simple things – nature, the love of another.

In the past, the hippies would get stoned on drugs, now It Stoned Me tells of getting the same experience from a drink of clear water. The hippie experience showed itself to be hollow, and any hopes of creating a better world were dashed by a hard dose of reality, yet the same people are still trying to cling to that sense of mystical awareness.

As for the music itself, unlike the contemporary record-buying public, I think I preferred Astral Weeks to this one, which is overall more deliberately commercial (in fairness to Van Morrison, he said himself that he still needed to pay the bills).  Some of the delicate jazz elements are still there – the title track Moondance is a bit of swing jazz if you listen to the music rather than the singing, and I could imagine Sinatra covering it. Elsewhere there are touches of R&B, Irish folk, a dash of gospel, all sorts of a mélange of styles. I’m not a huge fan of Van Morrison’s voice – it’s a bit too nose and throat for my tastes – but he is quite varied on this, sometimes (such as on Crazy Love) soft and gentle, other times growly and bluesy. I started off liking the album more than I thought, but it starts, to my ear, to get a bit samey towards the end of side two.