State of wonder
Freed from lockdown, the Belfast cowboy remembers to be in the moment.
By Andrew Male.
The sound of now: Van Morrison remembers how to be in the moment.
Van Morrison
★★★★
Remembering Now
EXILE/VIRGIN. CD/DL/LP/MC
“PRETENDING MY life is not in ruins/ Pretending I’m not depressed.” So ran the opening lines on Pretending, the quietly devastating final song of Van Morrison’s last album of new music, 2022’s What’s It Gonna Take?. Maybe you didn’t make it that far, beaten down by all those songs about government mind control and the World Economic Forum. But here was the sound of a man in crisis, unsure whether he was having “some kind of breakthrough [or] a nervous breakdown” and putting it all in song.