There is no musician alive quite like Van Morrison. The 79-year-old is almost a folkloric figure at this point, a curmudgeon of such bizarre and specific idiosyncrasies that nearly everyone in music seems to have their own Van Morrison story to share.
His mercurial, often dysfunctional behaviour has birthed a million whispered anecdotes – some funny, some baffling, some surely apocryphal. (I remember a radio call-in segment years ago in which someone claimed that Morrison had been sat reading the paper at the venue where they were celebrating their nuptials; refusing to budge, the singer is supposedly pictured scowling in the background of their wedding photos.) And yet, Morrison’s music, a joyous, expansive offshoot of Rhythm and Blues, is nothing short of transcendent. One minute he’d be terrorising his bandmates with an impossible perfectionism, the next he’d be singing about the beauty of “days like this” with a voice that seemed to channel some ancient magic.
At least, this used to be the case. The Irish singer’s latest album New Arrangements and Duets – his 46th studio LP, out this week – is a reminder of what late-era Van Morrison means. A musically proficient but plodding elevator-ready mix of duets, throwback covers and re-recorded originals, it falls desperately short of his earlier brilliance. It’s by no yardstick the worst record in Morrison’s back catalogue: that dishonour may well go to Morrison’s dismal post-pandemic albums, which featured original protest songs such as “They Own the Media” and “Fodder for the Masses”. Or perhaps to the 30-odd nonsense songs he recorded to petulantly fulfil an unwanted record contract, available now on Spotify under the title The Infamous Contractual Obligation Recordings Of ‘67. (Whatever you’re imagining – it’s somehow weirder than that.) In any case, New Arrangements and Duets is no fresh nadir for Morrison. But it is a continuation of a decades-long decline: the lapsing of a career from something vital and captivating to something staid and ultimately dispensable.
Whether he would admit it or not, Morrison’s latest album reads like an attempt to shrug off the stigma of the last few years. During Covid, his public image took a battering; his dogmatic anti-establishment and anti-lockdown outbursts (which did not, he insisted, equate to anti-vaxxerism) seeped into his songwriting and his stage performances. He was never “cancelled” in any meaningful way – Morrison continued to perform in big venues, with typically sky-high ticket prices – but the backlash risked tipping his reputation from legendarily grumpy to outright toxic.
By contrast, New Arrangements and Duets is tame and apolitical, and – significantly – was recorded before the pandemic. Old big band covers are never going to bring Morrison back into music’s mainstream, but among his loyalists, this album might well deflate some of the lingering discomfort over his radical pandemic re-brand.
It’s a shame that this is the case at all. That the new measure of a Van Morrison record is whether it is politically problematic, or simply dull. Any real hope of a comeback album, a bona fide late-era classic, dissipated years ago. It’s not a matter of being too old: Bruce Springsteen, a mere four years Morrison’s junior, still releases new records to rave reviews. On tour, too, he puts on forceful, triumphant shows. Meanwhile, a new Morrison record is greeted with a halfhearted shrug, and his live performances tend to be as erratic as they are unenthusiastic. His reputation as a crank – a difficult and quarrelsome bandleader/interviewee/celebrity – is starting to outstrip his reputation as a musical genius.
This is sad – because “genius” really is no overstatement. What’s galling about the framing of Morrison as a rock’n’roll has-been is that it fails to acknowledge the full extent of his achievements. Across the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties and (to a lesser extent) the Nineties, Morrison recorded more genuinely great albums than most septuagenarian rockstars have albums in total. The canonisation of “Brown Eyed Girl” has often led to Morrison’s smearing in the popular imagination as someone who is overplayed at weddings, a little cloying, a little cheesy – but dig into his catalogue, and the depths and intricacies of his musicianship are incontrovertible, across a huge range of genres and sounds.
Even if we ignore his widely celebrated early work (the epochal Astral Weeks and the diamond-tight Moondance among it), there’s no shortage of beguiling detours. There’s his languid, spiritual 1980 album Common One, built around the coruscating, 15-minute-long “Summertime in England”; the trad music of his 1988 Chieftains collaboration Irish Heartbeat; and the glorious It’s Too Late to Stop Now, one of the finest live albums ever committed to record.
There may yet be a positive addendum to the waning arc of Morrison’s career. Among the myriad anecdotes of feuds and interpersonal quirks that trail Van the Man’s reputation, there’s another type of rumour – reports of music that he recorded under more felicitous circumstances. The sessions he’s said to have recorded with BB King’s backing band. The folk album supposedly sat in a vault somewhere.
In the world of commercialised music, few vaults stay sealed forever. And it would be nice to think that Morrison has one last great album left in him. Despite his efforts to obliterate all goodwill, Morrison, one of the 20th century’s great musicians, still deserves a victory lap. He just needs to start running.
‘New Arrangements and Duets’ by Van Morrison is out now