Astral Weeks - Van Morrison

Previous posts have outlined my fondness for remastered albums, and the way that a properly executed remastered release can contribute to newfound appreciation for the music it comprises. Entering 2015, my once daunting list of hoped-for remasters had dwindled to a precious few, with Prince and Van Morrison settling as vaguely surprising bedfellows atop the pile. Yet as far removed from one another as they - by nearly any metric - would seem to be, both Prince and Morrison share a history of aversion towards acknowledging past glories, fear of the future, and animosity towards record labels (in both cases, oddly, the reputedly artist-friendly Warner Bros.)  that made them ideal candidates to resist the long-overdue revisiting of their rich and expansive back catalogs. In February 2015, after years of rumors, it was finally confirmed that an expanded, anniversary edition of Purple Rain would be released before the end of the year. Meanwhile, as special editions of Moondance and other Morrison classics were announced and released, Astral Weeks - his most universally acclaimed album - remained uniquely (and bizarrely) untouched. So naturally, in late October, 2015, it was a newly burnished Astral Weeks that was unceremoniously dropped onto the market, while Purple Rain remained trapped in late-80s CD pressing purgatory with no end in sight.

Astral Weeks is a special album, one for which, by now, musical critics have reserved the most superlative of their superlatives for decades. And indeed, there's no good way to escape that trap: Astral Weeks is genuinely unique. It's unprecedented in popular music, untouched by the countless imitators spawned in its wake, and inexplicably, totally different from any other studio album produced by an artist who's recorded 35 of them. Morrison sings of love, death, and rebirth as though he was experiencing all three simultaneously, in studio. The jazzy arrangements have the same air as all the greatest albums in the medium from which they derive: so perfectly conceived and executed as to feel more like a happy accident than a master plan. The effect is like a Monet landscape, vibrant and all-encompassing precisely by way of its vagueness. The music evokes the quiet voices that ramble unobtrusively beneath the everyday noise in your head; it sounds like taking a walk with the moon shining just so, and has a way of bringing clarity and calm into any environment. This serenity is responsible for the magic trick Astral Weeks pulls off anew with every listen: making it seem as though Van Morrison - armed with his guitar, his voice, and newfound release from an insufferable contract with Bang Records - waltzed into Century Sound Studios and created the entire album in a sitting, unpremeditated.

To its credit, Warner Bros. payed off the interminable wait for an Astral Weeks update with a perfectly executed remastered album: pristine sound, nice liner notes, and enough bonus material to provide context without watering down the original contents. A languid early take of "Madame George" leans heavily on vibraphones; "Ballerina" stretches a full minute beyond its 7 minute final runtime. The new edition also reveals Astral Weeks - like almost every masterpiece - to have been made successful every bit as much by careful deliberation as by the feeling of spontaneity for which it's become famous. The first take of "Beside You" finds Morrison singing with a hesitancy compared to the final version, almost as though not yet fully tapped in to his own composition. "Slim Slow Slider," meanwhile, appears in an extended version revealing the sudden ending of the original album to have been an prudent edit by producer Lewis Merenstein. Tampering with the impression that Van Morrison appeared in studio in a trance and banged out all 8 tracks in perfect succession may not be to all tastes, but the survival of this effect through editing may make the accomplishment more impressive. One would have to imagine a suitable set of hands could similarly augment the already exalted legacy of Purple Rain; whether such a set of hands exist, unfortunately, only time can tell.