“In the Garden” by Van Morrison

Van Morrison wrote "In the Garden" for No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, his 1986 album, and the record takes its title from one of the song's lines. He cut it in 1985 in Studio D at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, producing it himself, with Mick Glossop recording and mixing and Jim Stern also engineering.

It's a song of spirit rather than flesh. Morrison has said it is built on a form of transcendental meditation, the ten minutes or so it takes to reach a certain calm, and some of its images drift back toward Astral Weeks, echoing "Madame George" and "Sweet Thing". His biographer Johnny Rogan counts it among the defining tracks of his career, in the company of "Into the Mystic", "Listen to the Lion" and "You Don't Pull No Punches, But You Don't Push the River".

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