Sunday, February 21, 2010

Song of the Day: Van Morrison - Astral Weeks

It is impossible to understate how amazing the album Astral Weeks is.  I have it in my "Top 10 of All-Time" list, and I'm pretty sure I came to own it because it's in everybody's top 10 list.  So while I'm hardly original, I find it interesting that a record so impossible to categorize - it's not Rock, it's not Jazz, it's certainly not Pop - is so widely adored.

While "The Way That Young Lovers Do" is probably the closest thing to a Pop song, the opening title track remains my favorite.  Just check out the first lyrics:

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

Lester Bangs wrote the definitive review of this album, and I wish I could link to it, but I can't find it anywhere.  He calls it the "quality of a beacon" and a "mystical document," and if you've never been moved by an album review, you've never read Lester Bangs.  And at the risk of being melodramatic, if you've never heard Astral Weeks, you've never heard what music is capable of.

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