Van Morrison's 'Remembering Now'

A Musical Return To Form...But Which Form?

Remembering Now is Van Morrison’s 47th studio album and I daresay it sports the dullest cover of the 47. Though the one before it is close.

“Van Morrison’s recent music has been at times risible, yet others intermittently lovely and bonkers, where his genius consistently shines through irrespective of the asinine context.” — Elizabeth Nelson, Pitchfork

“Back to writing love songs / May get paid at the end of the day…” — Van Morrison

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I’m liking the new Van Morrison album Remembering Now, his first of original material since 2022. But I have also been bemused by the critical raves about it. Many are saying it’s Van the Man’s best album of the 21st Century (no), or maybe even his best album since the 1980s (NO!). I’d say it’s his best album since…well…2021.

That’s no knock on Remembering Now! It’s a return to form for the greatest English language singer-songwriter poet of the past 60 years. But you gotta remember Van contains multitudes and his personal brand has held many “forms” over his career: Teen pop star, white boy bluesman, moody Éire artiste, Christian mystic, working man touring performer, a couple others.

To my ears, this 47th studio album(!) from the Northern Irish troubadour aurally resembles Van Morrison’s late 80s/early 90s music romantically and spiritually — Fiachra Trench, who lushly orchestrated songs on 1989’s Avalon Sunset returns with similar effect — but without the overtly Christian religious lyrical trappings; it’s more of a generic godly walking through the misty mystic mountains alongside the rapturous rolling river in the sunny summertime and gazing down upon the cosmic highway during the eternal now kind of stuff.

I count three standout tracks, one with an asterisk: The album’s snazzy, jazzy, R&B opener “Down To Joy” is memorable for sure, a throwback to 1960s Stax-style 45s with punchy horns and chunka-chunka guitars. It’s so good it already got nominated for 2021’s Best Song at the Academy Awards when it appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s film Belfast (and should’ve won over creepy Billie Eyelash’s 007 dirge). It’s nice to have it on a full album and it starts off Remembering Now on a strong assertive note, but it’s not fresh.

Another year, another category, another misbegotten decision from the Motion Picture Academy.

The song that caught my attention right away was the fun, jaunty, almost-a-throwaway “Back to Writing Love Songs,” one of those sly, self-referential super-catchy ditties Van knocks out about songwriting every once in a while. This one is more good natured and less cynical than some have been, and might be a covert victory lap after his first couple albums this decade were spent tunefully complaining about lockdowns, mandatory vaxx, authoritarianism, lame rock star phonies, etc., as the song concludes “Got to play / At the end of the day.”

The other song I’m loving is far more epic. Slow, beautiful, pensively percussive “When the Rains Came” is a transcendently good quiet song that builds to a thunderous vocal climax. The singing is soooo invigorating and revitalizing! How does he do it?

That’s the biggest takeaway from the album: Van Morrison’s vocals for a man nearly 80 years old are uncanny. Van's voice has truly been blessed (or scientifically maintained and upheld? Just asking questions!), initially in his youth for the awesome sheer soulful vocal power of his singing, but now decades later for also being able to hold on to that prowess deep into his 70s. He’s touring and the performances are visible on YouTube, so we know it’s not studio fakery. It’s remarkable!

That voice gets to stretch out most effectively on “When the Rains Came,” but there are a few other long ruminative compositions — including the title track and the nine-minute saga and album closer “Stretching Out” — that are getting hosannahs from the rock press. I suppose deservedly so because the singing is soooo good, but musically they remind me a lot of earlier tracks (that I liked), and don’t exude the same zing of new and fresh and original direction from the creative artist, like the way I get it from the three top-tier tracks detailed above.

I will self-satisfyingly note that the album’s big time raves from critics regarding a good-but-not-great album with a few standout tracks offer a two-fold buttressing of points I’ve made earlier about where we are as a culture and other Signs O’ The Times.

One: Yes, the album is good, but Van Morrison is also being rewarded by the mainstream for lyrically moving away from his blows against the Empire, 2020-22, when he bitched & moaned (to great artistic effect, IMHO: his Covid-lockdown inspired double album is his actual best release of the 21st Century) about government authoritarianism, news coverage cowards and media hypocrites.

Second: As I’ve mentioned before, citing the late great Neal Postman and his paradigm shifting book Amusing Ourselves to Death, when fed a steady diet of mediocrity and content instead of art, people lose perspective and overpraise the merely good.

I’m not saying Van’s recent output has been mediocre, but it has been idiosyncratic and far outside the mainstream: His last five albums have included two of exclusively cover songs (all-skiffle Moving on Skiffle; classic rock Accentuate the Positive), a 2014 historical live recording at his old high school before it was closed, an album of remakes of his own songs, and another of unreleased instrumentals culled from archives.

Van Morrison has been remarkably prolific the past three years, albeit with no newly-written material until now.

Before those five albums were two years and three CDs worth + four singles complaining about the Establishment and Big Pharma and politicians and pop star puppets and a world of bottomless assholes who run things. Rebel music that I personally liked a lot and played a ton but did not win Van Morrison many friends in the controlled corrupt collectivist corporate clown media.

But now all seems to be forgiven, not the least of which because Van Morrison was ultimately proven right about nearly everything he’d been saying during those controversial albums’ years.

While I’ve got your ear, I might as well say many good things about Van’s 2021 double album Latest Record Project, Vol. I, recorded and released during the fake Covid pandemic. That’s the artistic keeper of everything he’s released in the past 25 years, a bunch of great songs across a wide range of musical genres from rock’n’roll to blues to jazz to pop to the energetic blasts of proto-punk rage channeled straight out of his 1960s band Them. It’s genius stuff, the fascist oppression of the times clearly inspired an aging artist to new creative heights (actually old heights, but whatever).

There are other musical highlights the past few years, no question. The skiffle album is at times likewise inspired, and like the new album closes with a nine-minute epic, a cover of the traditional children’s song “Green Rocky Road” that comes from outta nowhere to stand with his all-time best work, stunningly transportive stuff.

I also really like the jazzed-up horn-heavy revision of “The Master’s Eyes,” a forgotten deep cut from Van’s 1985 album A Sense of Wonder, re-imagined for his otherwise mostly forgettable 2024 New Arrangements and Duets. It may be the only improvement upon the original version, culled from the most insignificant album of Van Morrison’s career (though boy do I love that one brassy song).

But back to the new album. In conclusion, I wouldn't put Remembering Now among the Belfast Cowboy’s all-time best work, but I would say it’s in the upper tier of his 21st Century material. Especially the first half, with the Oscar-nom’d single/opener, the catchy country-tinged second single “Cutting Corners,” the hymn-like “Haven’t Lost My Sense of Wonder” and “Back To Writing Love Songs.” The second half, I’ll refer to the “dean of rock critics” Robert Christgau’s favorable review of late ‘80s Van: “His own unique gender exercise, a today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-Van’s-life. And he gets away with it.”

Amen to that, and keep ‘em coming, O Great One. “Back to Writing Love Songs,” indeed.

According to Billboard magazine, Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” remains the single-most downloaded song from the 1960s, and is one of the ten most-played songs in the history of radio. Here’s an amusing video of a visibly uncomfortable 21-year old Van Morrison (badly) lip-synching his hit single on American Bandstand with Dick Clark in 1967.