The album's centerpiece is "Madame George," a stream-of-consciousness narrative of personal psychological and spiritual archetypes deeply influenced by the road novels of Jack Kerouac. He confesses as much in the title track: "If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dream/Where immobile steel rims crack/And the ditch in the back roads stop/ Could you find me?/Would you kiss-a my eyes/.To be born again." Morrison doesn't reach out to the listener, but goes deep inside himself to excavate and explore. Morrison seems hypnotized by his subjects they comfort and haunt a present filled with inexhaustible longing and loneliness. They are, for the most part, extended, incantatory, loosely narrative, and poetic ruminations on his Belfast upbringing: its characters, shops, streets, alleys, and sidewalks, all framed by the innocence and passage of that era. The freewheeling, loose feel adds to the intimacy and immediacy in the songs. If his pop hit "Brown-Eyed Girl" was the first place he explored the "previous" - i.e., the depths of his memory - for inspiration and direction, he immerses himself in it here. He fully enters the mystic here, more in the moment than he ever would be again in a recording studio.
Morrison's songs are an instinctive, organic mixture of Celtic folk, blues, and jazz. Producer Lewis Merenstein added chamber orchestrations later and divided the album into halves: "In The Beginning" and "Afterwards" with four tunes under each heading. Van Morrison plays acoustic guitar and sings in his elastic, bluesy, soulful voice, accompanied by crack group of jazz studio players: guitarist Jay Berliner, upright bassist Richard Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay, vibraphonist Warren Smith and soprano saxophonist John Payne (also credited on flute, though that's debatable - some claim an anonymous flutist provided those parts). Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history, but for all that renown, it is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album.
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