He didn’t make any suggestions about what to play, how to play, how to stylize what we were doing.”Īt the time, Morrison’s solo career was just getting under way earlier he had led the rough rock and R&B band Them. “People say, ‘He must have talked to you about the record and created the magic feeling that had to be there….’ To tell you the truth, I don’t remember any conversations with him.

“Some people are real disillusioned when I tell them about making the record,” says Richard Davis, who supplied what may be the most acclaimed bass lines ever to grace a pop record. It also sounds like the work of a group of musicians who had become finely attuned to one another through years of working together - but, in fact, Morrison had made his name with rock songs like “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night,” and he sang Astral Weeks sitting by himself in a glass-enclosed booth, scarcely communicating with the session musicians, who barely knew who he was.

He didn’t use the phrase for a song title until a year later, but Astral Weeks was the album on which Van Morrison fully descended “into the mystic.” Morrison’s first full-fledged solo album sounded like nothing else in the pop-music world of 1968: soft, reflective, hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in the title track, “nothing but a stranger in this world.”

Walsh astral weeks van morrison