Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It: Van Morrison

When my number came up for another spin round this feature, I found that the three artists who came to mind had all been covered already. Then I found myself listening back to an artist who I hadn’t given much attention for some time and rediscovered the best and worst of his art. Van Morrison can produce music which is as intense and spiritually uplifting as anything ever produced. But equally can turn in records which sound like he was told “make a typical Van Morrison album” and just went on to autopilot. My experience is that he is the same live. Having seen both his transcendentally wonderful heights and a simply ‘couldn’t give a damn’ performance, and written about it here, I’m still inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, most of the time, because the high points are just so good.

Can’t Live With It: “Days Like This” (1995)

There’s a touch of shooting fish in a barrel about this side of the equation, as in recent decades, there have been more missteps than hits. “Latest Record Project, Volume 1″ would have been an easy choice, but as I have never managed to sit through the whole thing, I don’t feel qualified to talk about it. Its inclusion in Rolling Stone’s “50 Genuinely Horrible Albums by Brilliant Artists” is well deserved. The album that I have honestly tried to like, and utterly failed with, is 1995’s “Days Like This”. This really is paint-by-numbers Van, summed by the song ‘Songwriter’ where he tells us: “I’m a songwriter, and my check’s in the mail”. If it had been made in 2025, you might accuse it of being A.I. Morrison. All the bits are there, but there is no soul. It’s almost as if, in creating the album as therapy of “Too Long In Exile” and the live brilliance of “A Night in San Francisco”, he had simply run out of inspiration. Even the cover, of Morrison and his then wife Michelle Rocca being taken for a walk by their Greyhounds (one of which looks like he’s been made to listen to the album once too often), feels like it was a photo lying around the studio, which would do instead of having to come up with anything better. You can’t fault the band, many of whom had been playing with him for a while and were all excellent players. They do their best with substandard material, but in the end, there is just no spark.

All Music’s review sums the album up as “completely competent yet completely uninspired pop-R&B workout, with Van sounding as if he couldn’t care less about the words leaving his mouth.” I’ll consider my point made. No idea how this made it onto “The Essential Van Morrison”.

Can’t Live Without It “Into The Music” (1979)

A hard choice, as ‘A Night in San Francisco’ is up there in the top three live albums ever for me. It’s a love letter to all the music he’s been inspired by, mixed with some of the best of his own work. It also includes two of the best songs from my ultimate pick, ‘It’s All in the Game’ and ‘You Make Me Feel So Free.’ I heard ‘Bright Side Of The Road’ when it came out in 1979 and bought the album on the strength of it. To be honest, some of it was a bit deep for a teenager, but the opening duo of ‘Bright Side Of The Road’ and ‘Full Force Gale’ was as good as anything I’d heard then and still is.

As time has passed, other songs have grown in stature for me. ‘Troubadours,’ ‘And the Healing Has Begun,’ and the impressionistic closing song ‘You Know What They’re Writing About’ have all spoken to me at various points in life. One of those albums that, once you put it on, is hard to take off. It demands your full attention. Rolling Stone said it was a “vastly ambitious attempt to reconcile various states of grace: physical, spiritual and artistic”. No wonder teenage me didn’t quite get it. I didn’t revisit Van Morrison for a few years, finding him again through ‘Dweller on the Threshold’ and ‘Cleaning Windows’ on “Beautiful Vision”. I moved back from them to the great early seventies albums, but nothing there has ever spoken to me like ‘Into The Music’ continues to do.