“And It Stoned Me” by Van Morrison

"And It Stoned Me" opens Van Morrison's 1970 album Moondance, and forget what the title suggests: the high here is the natural kind. Morrison traced it back to a childhood trip, when he was about 12, to go fishing at Ballystockart; on the way, an old man in a little stone house gave the boys water from the stream, and as they drank, time seemed to stop dead for a few minutes. His biographer Ritchie Yorke read it as a memory of how a kid could get stoned on nature alone.

The Northern Irish singer cut it in the summer of 1969 at Warner Publishing Studio in New York City and produced it himself, with Lewis Merenstein as executive producer and Elliot Scheiner mixing. It rolls in easy and warm, a loose, soulful stroll that swells into a joyous shout, with Morrison's voice doing the praying.

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