Astral Weeks

Van Morrison recorded this album in three sessions across three weeks in New York City in the fall of 1968. He was broke. He had just escaped a crushing record contract. The jazz musicians he played with had never heard his songs before they walked into the studio. There were no rehearsals. There was no safety net.

What they made sounds like it came from somewhere outside of time.

There is no clean way to describe what Astral Weeks sounds like. It is acoustic guitar and upright bass and flute and strings and Morrison's voice moving through it all like a man searching through fog for something he cannot name. It is folk music and jazz music and something that is neither of those things. It does not resolve the way you expect music to resolve. It circles. It breathes. It returns to phrases the way your mind returns to memories you cannot shake.

The nine-minute "Madame George" is one of the great sustained pieces of recorded music in the history of rock, a song about leaving something behind that makes the leaving feel like losing the whole world. Morrison himself said he did not fully understand it. That is part of the point.

This record was not a hit when it came out. It was barely promoted. It found its audience slowly, over years, the way the best things do. Fifty years later it is considered one of the greatest albums ever made.

There are records you listen to and records that listen to you. This is the second kind.