I know almost every piano flourish of Van Morrison’s
Into The Music. Every whisper and moan, shout, strangled vocal, loose roar. Every cymbal caress, every violin keen and those plucked guitar strings just make me swoon. “You know what they’re writing about”, he says. “This thing called love. I want you to meet me.” And the sun outside seemed brighter and the food I was eating grew richer and warmer and more full of goodliness than I thought possible for steak and garlic and vegetables. I knew that she was not afraid of speaking out, that for all her younger years than I, that she was confident and assured and earnest. It’s another place and another time that Van Morrison takes me, where people spend their moments walking the streets of Paris in the month of May in search for someone who thinks the same way as them. And maybe she’s sitting here and thinking I could be someone like that, across from me at the café as we all talk and laugh in the breeze.
And the trees are swaying and my tea is vanilla and when she laughs, her whole body moves too and her eyes widen with delight, wider than I would have thought possible. And we all know each other to varying degrees, some of us only for a few minutes, some for years, but we race in our speech and our stories and our little vignettes because we feel like we should have known each other for longer. And the pulse runs hot and cold as the mood is languid and unforced velocity. We tell our little jokes. We laugh. We finish our coffees and our cups of tea and our wine. “I want you to meet me,” says the Van. “And know know know know. Are you there?”
Yeah, there’s a moment in “And The Healing Has Begun” where the Van stops singing about backstreet jelly-roll and ponders about why his love stays up so late, standing on the street, and invites himself into her place with some sherry and port and listens to her Muddy Waters record with her. And it seems so intimate and warm you feel like the music that he makes has wrapped you into a little cocoon. I just want to stay there. It’s a lovely little simulacra, and moments like that are so rich and varied throughout
Into The Music, that I want to escape there so often. It’s my little place where I know all the furniture, where I know all the corners, and all the people there, where I know I can be happy, or sad, or anything else and it seems all right. I try to imagine a time and place right now without
Into The Music and it doesn’t seem as nice. Like he says, it makes me feel so free.
Lord Beavish's Top 10:
1. Into the Music – Van Morrison
2. The Band – The Band
3. Hard Again – Muddy Waters
4. Darkness on the Edge of Town – Bruce Springsteen
5. Layla and other assorted Love Songs – Derek and the Dominoes
6. Blood on the Tracks – Bob Dylan
7. Car Wheels On A Gravel Road – Lucinda Williams
8. Abbey Road – The Beatles
9. Kind of Blue – Miles Davis
10. 16 Lovers Lane – The Go-Betweens
