This year marks the 10th anniversary of Van Morrison’s 2000s masterpiece Magic Time, his only album for Geffen Records. It’s not exactly as cool as the notion of Van using fellow Irishmen the Boomtown Rats as his backup group (which would have been amazing), but its the closest the singer came to getting on their wavelength. Most notably, its title track saw the incorporation of synthesizers, as Peter Bardens and his spacey Moog loops help keep Morrison from slipping into irrelevance on the cusp of the New Wave era. “Wavelength”Īlthough initially met with less-than-stellar citiques, the passing of time has proven to be most compensatory for Wavelength. Van revisited it on the 1988 collaborative album with fellow countrymen The Chieftains, as well as on this year’s Duets: Re-Working The Catalogue with guitarist and fellow Gaelic music enthusiast Mark Knopfler. But never has it been as explicitly expressed as it is on “Irish Heartbeat,” a song that first debuted on 1983’s Inarticulate Speech of the Heart. The emerald undercurrent of Morrison’s homeland heritage has always played a role in the music he’s created over the last half-century. However, whether he liked it or not, “Brown Eyed Girl” has since become his reluctant calling card, the one Van Morrison song everyone seems to know about due to its firm place on classic rock radio, its appearance in such acclaimed films as The Big Chill and Born on the Fourth of July and the fact its a song in regular rotation in the iPods of no less than two American presidents.
Van claimed he never saw a penny of royalties and the contract he naively signed rendered him liable for all expenses incurred during the recording process, which is probably a big reason why he doesn’t consider it one of his favorite songs from the catalog.
Originally titled “Brown Skinned Girl”, this Calypso-kissed AOR staple about an alleged interracial tryst and deemed too hot for pop radio upon its release was without question the biggest hit from Morrison’s ill-fated tenure with groundbreaking producer/songwriter Bert Berns and his Bang Records label. To celebrate this news, Paste has put together a list of 15 of the best Van Morrison songs from all phases of the man’s storied career-the ones that quintessentially define the Northern Irish icon’s wholly unique fusion of blues, jazz, classical, pop, skiffle, and R&B and make him such an international treasure. And on October 30, Rhino will be reissuing expanded editions of classics like 1968’s Astral Weeks and 1970’s His Band and the Street Choir, featuring a host of great alternate takes and long versions of key album cuts. Looking ahead, Sony has also announced plans to release deluxe Legacy Editions of deep career cuts like Saint Dominic’s Preview, It’s Too Late To Stop Now, Hard Nose the Highway, and Enlightenment. Additionally, Sony released the 37-track career spanning anthology The Essential Van Morrison.
Last month, however-just three days shy of Morrison’s 70th birthday-Sony’s Legacy Recordings acquired the grand majority of his catalog, making 33 records available digitally for streaming services. Records in 1983, the legendary singer from Belfast has jumped from label to label ever since, most recently signing with RCA Records for the release of his latest LP, Duets: Re-Working The Catalogue, a collection of collaborations that do just as the title implies. Following his departure from Warner Bros. Van Morrison’s travails with the music industry have punctuated the majority of his half-century-long career in music.
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