This is the only song I have had on repeat all the time over the last week since first hearing it on Friday.
As a long term Van Morrison fan that probably isn’t a surprise, least of all to me.
Except it’s the only song from the new album – which I think is his best album since Magic Time (2005) which was at that time his best since Days Like This in the 1990s – that with me that has happened. I was thinking about why.
Yes. Why. Always a more interesting thing motivation. It’s more riveting than the what, who or how – don’t you think?
The what nevertheless (it’s a vulnerable ballad), the who (iconic Huddie Ledbetter and Brother Ray influenced blues shouter, jazz, proto garage-rock, pop, occasionally skiffle, folk, occasionally country, Irish trad, transcendental Celtic rock, R&B, blue eyed soul singer-songwriter and balladeer who is 80 this summer), the how (the sound comes with strings, guitar, bass, backing vocals, keys, organ in a lush blend) swirls around in the need to know milieu.
It’s connecting this why business to the present without navel gazing too much.
Why something connects with someone and doesn’t with another person is a phenomenon.
Play the song, any song to 100 people and I am sure some might not like it at all. Some might love it, some might think it OK. No problem.
Who cares what someone else thinks? If a piece of art is meaningful to you on a personal level that’s better surely than parroting thirdhand someone else’s possibly insincere thoughts. We’re talking the music business after all where sincerity does not gather in massive abundance and where reviewers hedge their bets or get strung along by publicists and review in fly-by-night cynical fashion.
Firstly I am a fan of Fiachra Trench who arranged the strings so the fact the ‘Have I Told You Lately’ strings arranger is involved on the new album is a big thing. It hasn’t happened for a while.
The strings themselves are from a chamber group called the Fews Ensemble and they play a big part in why I like the record. I’d never heard of them before.
Bass guitar is Nicky Scott – I saw him live last year in the band of Ronnie Greer. And the keyboardist and organist on this song John McCullough was also at that Ardhowen blues show. Come to think of it I’ve also heard him with Empire legend “Big” Ken Haddock – god where was it? A capacious venue called Cafe Vaudeville on Arthur Street a decade ago – if memory serves me correctly.
But guitar from Dave Keary is more important. Keary I think is from Limerick – I’ve heard him a few times live in Van’s bands, most recently during Lockdown at the PowerHaus not that long, less than a few years, before big time operator Vince Power who had bought the venue formerly Dingwalls in Camden Lock, died. One of the backing singers Crawford Bell on Remembering Now, a gospel singer from the north, died not that long ago. I heard Bell in Van’s band when the mystic of the East played Ronnie Scott’s circa his country album Pay the Devil in 2006 and at the Roundhouse in 2007.
So the strings are important. And so are the words in particular the line which strikes me as very perceptive in a song that is an examination of intimacy and honest statement expressed to someone loved, like a comforting song.
Your eyes give you away
Van Morrison, Don Black
You’ve been quiet all night long
That’s poetry. Usually I listen to instrumental music. There aren’t words. Songs can be both in loose parlance an instrumental or a song with words. With the latter you might know the words but don’t (can’t literally) hear them as they aren’t sung and yet you hear them inside because you know them from before in some other version.
When a jazz band does a standard and there is no singer – like doing say ‘Here’s That Rainy Day’ – you think of the words even when there isn’t a singer. They are a ghost presence. But when the words are there it’s more powerful, not always if they are terrible which they often are, but often.
And here there is such insight in these lines, it’s like it’s not about the person singing but the invisible person, it could be anybody as the person isn’t named, who the song is being addressed to.
It’s considerate and perceptive – like when a friend spots something is the matter and that friend is allowed to say it because their voice will be allowed and needed. It’s a revelation in some ways. The person addressed doesn’t know what’s the matter with them but the friend, the lover does and in this case that is a comfort given the way the arrangement caresses the melody. That’s why I like the song. It means something.
MORE FROM MARLBANK
Fiachra…always makes it perfect!