1986 Boston Globe interview
If ever there's been a singer whose music resonates on a deeply personal level, it is Van Morrison. After writing several rock standards in the 1960s and early '70s - including "Here Comes the Night," "Gloria," "Brown-Eyed Girl" and "Domino" - he essentially turned his back on the commercial world. He later delved into introspective song suites keyed around spiritual growth, to the point where he's almost viewed as a New Age artist today. Even the titles of his recent albums have testified to that inward search: Beautiful Vision, Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, A Sense of Wonder and his mesmerizing new work, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, the most humble, down-to-earth album of what could be called his spiritual series. But no matter how much peace of mind the albums suggest he has found, the 40-year-old Irishman remains elusive about it. During the first interview of his new American tour, which began Friday at Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts, Morrison was like a dancing Buddha (and at times a caustic one) on the issue of how much his musical changes reflect his own life. "It's not about myself. The records are not about me. That's just something I do. It's my job. It's what I do for a living," he says, curled up like a nervous ball of energy in a cushion chair on his tour bus before the show. But if it was only a job, I suggest, why wouldn't you just write Top 40 songs instead of pretty suites? "Because I don't really think like that anymore. If I get the inspiration for a song, it doesn't say, 'Well, this is Top 40,' They don't come like that. I don't know what that question means, really." It means your music sounds like much more that a job, that it's a lot more personal that a Duran Duran record, I add. "It's not really personal," he snaps. "it just seems personal because that's the way I'm doing it. Say Ray Charles sings something like 'Yesterday' - it doesn't mean that it's about him. Or if Frank Sinatra does 'My Way,' it doesn't mean that that song is Frank Sinatra, right? It's not about him. He's interpreting that. But then people come and say, 'Well, 'My Way,' that's about Frank Sinatra,' But it isn't. It's only the way things have to be packaged for the media that it's thought of that way. I mean that's the only way I can find to put it. I don't write about myself. I don't put myself out. I'm not selling myself. I'm selling records and I'm selling songs, and the records are the byproducts of the songs. That's what it is. It's nothing personal." Yet you're writing about a man, someone - a soul - who is on a spiritual search, aren't you? "Truman Capote called it faction - part fact and mostly fiction. And that's what my songs are. It's a lot of fiction and some fact," he says, sipping black coffee, fidgeting in his seat, staring out the window and rarely making eye contact. "Unfortunately, this gets mixed up by the media, and they think this is about your life. Of course, you always put in some things that you might be thinking or reading about, or discussing with people. You'll always end up putting some of that in. But to say it's about my life - or about me or about some spiritual search - is stretching a point. Even though I'm writng about that, that doesn't mean that's me. So it's faction, that's what it is." All of which, I say sounds curiously like the theme of detachment from everyday life as mentioned in the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text Morrison has specificially cited in his music this decade. "I try not to talk about what I read, I don't really want to talk about that in this context," he says grouchily. "Then somebody sees this interview somewhere else and they say, 'Oh yeah, you're reading so-and-so,' and they try and pigeonhole you into what you're reading, the same as they try to pigeonhole you into what you did 10 years ago. So I prefer to keep myself separate from what I do. What I do is I sing and play music, and I make albums, then I do gigs, you know? And I'm not doing that all of the time, so the other things are mine. So I'd rather not discuss what I read because that's my own personal business." You seem to feel that whatever you say is going to be twisted, I say, trying not to be stiff-armed by his attitude "Well, that's what happens. I've said things 15 years ago, and people still come and ask me about it ... I mean, something I said 15 years ago is not going to be relevant today. Tomorrow morning I might feel something completely different. Like everybody else, I don't want to be locked into something I said. By the weekend , I might have forgotten about it." Is there anything you said 15 years ago that needs to be corrected? Any misunderstanding? "No, no. And even if it was corrected, I can still change my mind," he says. "So it's pointless anyway. Something I say is not a fixed thing. I always have the choice of changing my mind, or thinking differently about it, because this is the human process. I just don't like to be fixed into anything." So you'd rather not reveal where you are spiritually, or what you believe? "I don't know what you're talking about, because I've never said that I was into anything. I never said 'I am this' or 'I am that.' I never discuss those things with the press - or with anybody." But they're in the music, aren't they? You talk about the "Father" and "Christ Consciousness" and the "Master's Eyes," You seem very much attuned to that, I say. "But that's in any creative writing - songs, books, poetry. Go to the library and look at poetry. It's full of those kinds of things. But nobody comes along and says, 'T.S. Eliot was this,' or '(William) Blake was that."' Sadly, one thing hasn't changed with Van Morrison: He still hates to do interviews, which should be obvious to anyone reading this far. "I just look upon interviews as strictly business, I suppose. They tell me this promotes albums," he says before making his exit. "I don't really want to do interviews. What can I tell you?" He's not the best album promoter, either. As for what he's proudest of on his new LP, he says, "No, I'm not into any of that stuff at all. It's not part of my universe. I don't think about the records. I just do them, and then the records come out and I do gigs, I mean, I just forget about them." Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website |