“Caravan” by Van Morrison

"Caravan" is one of the jewels of Van Morrison's 1970 album Moondance, cut at Mastertone Studios in New York City on 30 July 1969. Morrison drew it from his days in a rural house in Woodstock, New York, where the neighbors lived a long way down the road and a radio playing somewhere could sound as if it were right there in the room. From that came a song that holds up gypsy life and the radio as twin pictures of harmony, and he sings it like a man about to lift off, the band swinging hard beneath him.

Morrison produced it, with Lewis Merenstein as executive producer and Elliot Scheiner mixing. On stage it became a showstopper for years: it's on the 1974 live set It's Too Late to Stop Now, and he tore through it with The Band in Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz.

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