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Van Morrison To Issue Live “Astral Weeks”

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Famed blue-eyed soul singer Van Morrison‘s first-ever live performance of career-defining 1968 album Astral Weeks gets a February 10 release on his EMI-distributed Listen To The Lion label. The Northern Ireland-born R&B belter played the jazz- and blues-tinged milestone twice with a band that included a full string section last November at the Hollywood Bowl. Spotlighting swirling Morrison gems such as the title song and the gender-bending “Madame George,” Astral Weeks was Morrison’s first solo release for Warner Bros. after his Belfast-based beat combo Them topped the U.S. charts with British Invasion stalwarts “Gloria,” “Here Comes The Night” and “Mystic Eyes.” Morrison repeated his early chart success with his 1967 debut solo single “Brown-Eyed Girl” and a follow-up longplayer, Blowin’ Your Mind!, that featured such tortured classics as “Who Drove The Red Sports Car” and fabled nine-minute opus “T.B. Sheets.” Morrison will perform Astral Weeks as well as some of his other songs February 27 and 28 at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

“Astral Weeks” from 1968’s Astral Weeks:

One reply on “Van Morrison To Issue Live “Astral Weeks””

Astral Weeks is the album that reveals the elasticity of music– that a performer can emerge from a pop music idiom to completely transcend them, creating something so unique and so unconstrained by formal concerns as to become a work of art outside of time and tradition.

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