Van Morrison - Lit Up Inside: Selected Lyrics

Lit Up
Inside SELECTED LYRICS VAN MORRISON City Lights Books | San Francisco LIT UP INSIDE: SELECTED LYRICS Copyright 2014 by Van Morrison Foreword copyright 2014 by David Meltzer Foreword by Ian Rankin copyright 2014 by John Rebus Ltd Introduction copyright 2014 by Eamonn Hughes First City Lights Books edition, 2014 Photograph of Van Morrison courtesy of Mark McCall / Exile Productions This book is also available in an e-edition: 978-0-87286-661-4 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morrison, Van, 1945- author. [Lyrics. Selections] Lit up inside : selected lyrics / Van Morrison. First City Lights Books edition. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-87286-677-5 1.

Rock musicTexts. I. Title. ML54.6.M6715L58 2014 782.421640268dc23 City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133 www.citylights.com For Shana, abha and Fionn Foreword by David Meltzer Roland Barthes writes about the grain of voice, a special quality of tone and phrasing, unique in how it affects the listener. We can hear it in many American blues singers, country singers, jazz vocalists, voices that seem to come out of seemingly timeless realms. I remember hearing Thems first crossover hit, Gloria, followed by the mysterious Here Comes The NightVan Morrison was 18 years old, fronting a Belfast band, and his grain of voice reflected an edgy joy and forthright certainty.

Morrison was born in Belfast in 1945, and his father was a record collector who loved blues and jazz, which the son embraced with an ongoing passion. An essential revelation, Morrison absorbed that music as the ground of what would become his own art. He was also a reader of poetry, and his lyrics call out Rimbaud, Blake, Donne, Whitman, Gibran, Coleridge, Yeats; even T.S. Eliot gets a nod. Songs are kinda like windows, Van Morrison says in an early interview, and this collection of lyrics offers a major insight into his experience. Written with a fierce purity, they explore the unfolding journey of his life.

His range of subjects is wide and personal; they form a life narrative, an ongoing involvement with selfs unfolding. Childhood or youthful memories are constant themes, appearing in many of the songs that evoke a time before the difficult, glaring public life. Indeed, his songs often reflect an ongoing struggle with fames deceptions and reductions. His love songs exult in the bewilderment and joy of exploring a key need, a tangle or release of an ongoing mystery. For me, Morrisons best lyrics are the ones filled with lived detail. I can especially appreciate his remembrance lyrics of life in Belfast as a child and young man.

In the Days Before Rock n Roll reminds me of my own days as a youngster in Brooklyn, trying to connect at night with a Del Rio station that played early country & western and traditional country music; trying to tune in to Sunday radio stations playing gospel music and live church exaltation; hearing early R&B and getting tantalizing tastes of rural and urban blues. For Morrison and myself these were unknown worlds, and we were entering them like lost continents that offered up infinite revelations. Morrison is an improviser in performance, like a jazz musician or those blues singers who improvise songs on the spot. His art heart is scored both on the page and in the air, as with many of the Beat poetsfor most of them, it was also music that shaped their line, their beat. Listening to Kerouac sing and scat and recite his varied blues lyrics we have an example of this way of getting the music in and out of the words, and Morrison is deep in that practice as well, living moment to moment in his performance, improvising, taking chances. edition of Van Morrisons selected lyrics, and its fitting, too, that its being published in the UK by the august Faber & Faber, home of the Modern Poets series (once upon a time edited by T.S. Eliot). Eliot).

City Lights remains a vital force in American publishing, bringing out works that challenge and affirm the resilient creative spirit. Morrisons aesthetic, his integrity and commitment to authenticity, fit right in with the ongoing constancy of the City Lights list of writers, poets, and musicians who have embraced both the possible and the impossible. He is a genuine original. Foreword by Ian Rankin On a windswept Scarborough beach, I really started to get Van Morrison. Id liked what Id heard up to then, but I hadnt heard much. This was 1989 and I was toiling: a flat in Tottenham I shared with my wife and our cat; a writing career that wasnt exactly making waves; a 90-minute-each-way commute to my job as a hi-fi reviewer in a dank basement in Upper Norwood.

One morning, as I fought my way onto the train, I felt my heart bursting through my chest. I was sweating and shaking, adrenaline surging. The train left without me and I headed to the doctors office. Panic attacks, he said. Get out of London for a bit, if you can. I packed a few things, including my Walkman and a dozen Van Morrison cassetteshis record company was reissuing his early catalog and had sent review copies.

Tottenham Hale to Kings Cross to York, where I stood on a platform staring at the departures board. Scarborough: Id never been there. Ticket, train, and eventually an out-of-season bed and breakfast with no view. On with the headphones and down to the deserted seafront with Veedon Fleece, St Dominics Preview, Hard Nose the Highway.... There were stories in the music, and characters and commentary. There was a search for the spiritual in the commonplace, the personal straining towards the universal.

I smiled at chamois cleaning all the windows, trying to think of another great lyricist who would begin a song with the conjuring of such an everyday chore. But then windows do need to be cleaned, or else theres a lack of clarity. Amidst the poetry there was room for disenchantment and anger, too. The Great Deception tackled politics, lazy ideals, and the recording industry. This was a music filled with beautiful visions, sung with passion and immaculate phrasing by a singer who was both of the world and rooted in a particular upbringing and landscape. My wife had grown up in Troubles-era Belfast, so I recognized some of the street names and the route maps through the Irish countryside.

Mind, I wasnt sure exactly what hard-nosing the highway actually meant, but I was getting an inkling. When Van Morrison sang of standing on the threshold, I realized he could be talking for all of us, poised throughout our lives between what we have already experienced and what may lie ahead. I was trying to summon the courage to quit my job and try to write full-time, to leave London and go travelling. Maybe that would be the end of the panic attacksI wouldnt know unless I took that first step over the threshold. Meantime, I turned my collar up against the elements and, when the music stopped, ejected one tape and replaced it with another. Great tunes and arrangements, impeccable musicianship, and that inimitable voicebut the words were a vital part of the whole, even when the sentiment was a simple but joyous Im in heaven when you smile.

So anyway, after a few days alone with myself I had to return to London, where my wife and I began to draw up our escape plan. Nearly 30 years on, I still have those cassettes. Plus the CDs and some of the vinyl. (And my wife.) And Van Morrison has continued to write with lyricism, passion and clear-headed articulation. From Mystic Eyes (196466) to Mystic of the East (2012), theres a spiritual element throughout, but there are also stories teeming with incident and characters, and grand travelogues, and an extolling of lifes simple pleasureslove and friendship, a quiet drink, silent empty spaces. In 1995s Songwriter he implores his audience: Please dont call me a sage/Im a songwriter.