The album that gave Bruce Springsteen “a sense of the divine”
These days, we might think of Bruce Springsteen and Van Morrison as occupying opposite ends of the spectrum, despite being two of the most iconic and best-selling rockers of all time. While their cultural relevance may pull them together, plenty separates their stance as artists.
The former is a blue-collared everyman who has a lengthy list of anthems to his name, ranging from ‘Born to Run’ to ‘Born In The U.S.A’. Springsteen is a champion of the little guy and a supporter of righteous causes, and there’s a reason why he is still hailed as ‘The Boss’, despite his recent Ticketmaster fiasco.
As for Van Morrison, whilst an incredibly talented musician famous for singing about brown-eyed girls and the expensive Tupelo Honey, he has long been known as music’s resident curmudgeon, and in 2020, he suffered a catastrophic PR disaster when he teamed up with the equally divisive Eric Clapton to release the much-maligned anti-lockdown song ‘Stand and Deliver’.
However, despite the criticisms directed at Morrison today, very few can deny that he has written countless classic tracks. His second album, 1968’s Astral Weeks, remains one of the most profound records of its day. It provided light in a year of serious social turmoil when the civil rights movement was in full swing, and tensions surrounding the Vietnam War forced the masses into the street. Putting the tense nature of the year into perspective, it was capped off when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on his balcony in Memphis.
The story goes that at the time of conceiving Astral Weeks, Morrison lodged himself in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, to hide from an abusive record contractor and set about getting his creative head into gear. Before too long, he travelled to New York, and it was here that he laid down the tracks for what would become his most significant body of work. It took only three short sessions to record the masterpiece, and afterwards, Van Morrison would be hailed as one of the most influential musicians of all time.
Astral Weeks had such an impact on every music lover of Morrison’s generation, including Bruce Springsteen. When appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, ‘Ths Boss’ explained that ‘Madame George’ is his favourite song from the album and said that the wider body of work gave him “a sense of the divine.”
Springsteen expressed: “Astral Weeks was an extremely important record for me. It made me trust in beauty; it gave me a sense of the divine. The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album.”
