If his pop hit 'Brown-Eyed Girl' was the first place he explored the 'previous' - i.e., the depths of his memory - for inspiration and direction, he immerses himself in it here. He fully enters the mystic here, more in the moment than he ever would be again in a recording studio. Morrison's songs are an instinctive, organic mixture of Celtic folk, blues, and jazz. Producer Lewis Merenstein added chamber orchestrations later and divided the album into halves: 'In The Beginning' and 'Afterwards' with four tunes under each heading. Van Morrison plays acoustic guitar and sings in his elastic, bluesy, soulful voice, accompanied by crack group of jazz studio players: guitarist Jay Berliner, upright bassist Richard Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet drummer Connie Kay, vibraphonist Warren Smith and soprano saxophonist John Payne (also credited on flute, though that's debatable - some claim an anonymous flutist provided those parts). Morrison got in his own way during the writing and recording of his album, but somehow the stars aligned and after three sessions of long takes Astral Weeks was born.Astral Weeks is generally considered one of the best albums in pop music history, but for all that renown, it is anything but an archetypal rock & roll album. This seminal piece of music went underappreciated for decades and by all accounts, it almost didn’t exist. It was the same year that saw The Beatles (or the 'White Album') and the first album by The Doors. It’s a jazzy pop record that slips in and out of time signatures with little regard for what was then cool or hip. Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is an anomaly in 1968. According to everyone who ever worked on the album, Morrison never introduced himself and just told them to play whatever they felt like playing.

Free from his former contractual obligations he recorded the album with a bunch of jazz musicians without telling them what to play. He also had to buy that contract back from mobsters for $20,000 in order to he make the jump to Warner Bros. The short version of the story is that Morrison didn’t want to work with his then-current label, so to get out of his contract he recorded an album full of unreleasable nonsense songs. The story behind Astral Weeks, Van Morrison’s landmark album, is fraught with bad decisions, angry record executives, and the mafia.

Van morrison astral weeks