Wondering if they may not be the same thing, or at least possessed of an intimate relationship.”Īnd that is enough to know for enhanced listening.īut we revisit the album as part of an ongoing look at all things about the United States as it was in 1968. He sensed an artist “transfixed between pure rapture and anguish.

“It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim … one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.” “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,” the legendary rock critic Lester Bangs wrote on the 10th anniversary of its release. Why does it strike so many as almost perfect?

So begins Astral Weeks, the sublime, eight-song album released in 1968 with little fanfare, though it endures 50 years later as Van Morrison’s very finest achievement. If I ventured in the slipstream Between the viaducts of your dream Where immobile steel rims crack And the ditch in the back roads stopĬould you find me? Would you kiss-a my eyes? To lay me down In silence easy To be born again

Van morrison live astral weeks