Van Morrison
Van Morrison
Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison, OBEis a Northern Irish singer, songwriter and musician. He has received six Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016 he was knighted for his musical achievements and his services to tourism and charitable causes in Northern Ireland...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth31 August 1945
CityBelfast, Northern Ireland
Van Morrison quotes about
I think intellectualization is what's killing most people.
When I first started drinking, it was working for me. It was great. Like when you're doing a gig and you're in a band and you're in the truck and there's nothing to do in the truck and the gigs are all the same and the hotels are all the same...it's the hotels, the car, the gig.
I just wanted to have a look at my whole musical career, get right back to when I started and why I started doing it in the first place.
If you're with a good band and everybody's from the old school, it's different. When you're in your element, you're in your element and things just come. You don't have to drag them out or force them out. They just happen.
I just wanted to stop and try to get some perspective. [ A Period of Transition] it was just a matter of wanting to review the whole thing...to try and get some relationship to what I was doing.
Like I said, basically I'm a rocker. That's about it. Things that I've done away from that-branches that I've gotten into off of that - are just other streams, other things that I can do.
I have to accept the fact that I was putting out records that reviewers were going to get an image from.
I didn't know what some of the stuff on Astral Weeks was about until years later.
I like [George] Benson because I just like it. I like that kind of style. I don't like the broken up kind of style. I don't like where you play for 16 bars and then break it up into what somebody's version of what birds twittering sounds like, or what the sound of the city is, or what New York sounds like.
It's like something happened to you that caused you to do what you do...you heard something somewhere, you felt something about this music that was definitely part of your own vision. That's what the whole thing is like.
I just can't stand it [ jazz/rock]. It just doesn't sound right to me. It doesn't hit me...it doesn't get me...it just doesn't grab me.
I'd been performing in bands since I was 12 which represented, at that point, about 16 years of playing music.
If you want to put your rock 'n' roll into mythology, [ A Period of Transition ] is from the Daddy Cool school.
There's novel reading, and then there's the other kind of reading. Take somebody like Carl Jung, the psychiatrist - now there's somebody worth getting into. With novels, I'm kind of fly by night. It isn't something I can be really consistent with.