They were inseparable for the rest of the tour, but the band’s work visas were not extended, and so Morrison and his bandmates reluctantly returned to Ireland. ' I looked at him, he looked at me, and it was alchemical whammo ,' she later recalled-a description of falling in love as good as any poet’s. Shortly before Them broke up, they toured America, and it was at a gig in San Francisco that Morrison met Janet Rigsbee, a 19-year-old model who happened to be attending her very first rock concert that night. Though he was still in his early 20s, he was already a music-industry veteran: The anarchic, raw-throated dynamo had been the front-man of the influential (if only semi-successful) garage rock band Them, most notable for popularizing the Morrison-penned classic Gloria , a proto-punk standard that would later be interpolated by everyone from the Doors to Patti Smith. 'When Van Morrison first began to sketch the songs that would become his 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks, he was temporarily back in Belfast but itching to go west. Journalist Brian Hinton wrote the following in a review of the song: ' All is uncertain, this spiritual rebirth a question still, not a statement, and Van equates his move to a new world - both America and that of love- with a sense of being lost, 'ain't nothing but a stranger in this world '.' (Wikipedia). ' Morrison told Steve Turner that he was working on the song back in Belfast in 1966 when he visited painter Cecil McCartney who had drawings on astral projection stated that his visit to the paint was what inspired him to name the album Astral Weeks. It's one of those songs where you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and that's basically what the song says.

I remember reading about you having to die to be born. Morrison described the song Astral Weeks as being: ' like transforming energy, or going from one source to another with it being born again like a rebirth.

To this day I find the Astral Weeks album to be a magical talisman. Listening to Astral Weeks for the very first time was a life-changing moment that captured my imagination. Looking back on those days, I vividly recall hearing this album for the first time when my brother Rob brought it home while on his college break. When I got out of bed his morning, I suddenly realized that 55 years ago Van Morrison's Astral Weeks album was released.

Van morrison astral weeks 2015