“Astral Weeks” by Van Morrison

"Astral Weeks" opens Van Morrison's 1968 album of the same name, and it sounds less like a song than a door swinging open onto somewhere else. It was cut on 25 September 1968, the first day of sessions, the last of four songs recorded that day, and flautist John Payne said he'd never heard it before; what sounds carefully rehearsed is the one and only take.

Morrison's voice and acoustic guitar lead the way, with Jay Berliner's classical guitar, Richard Davis's roaming double bass, Warren Smith's vibraphone and percussion and Payne's flute circling around him, and Lewis Merenstein producing. Morrison had been working on it back in Belfast in 1966, when a visit to the painter Cecil McCartney and his drawings of astral projection gave him the title, and he has described it as a song about rebirth, about dying in order to be born again.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.