“Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison

"Into the Mystic" drifts out of Van Morrison's 1970 album Moondance, cut during the album's sessions at A&R Recording Studios in New York between September and November 1969, with Morrison producing. It's a seeker's song, the kind of spiritual quest he kept returning to, and it circles back again and again to water as the thing that changes you, the bass rolling underneath like a boat riding a swell. The closing moments hint that it's a love song, too.

Morrison has said he first wrote it as "Into the Misty", and he liked how the sound-alike words let the song mean more than one thing. One writer set it beside "Yesterday" as a tune whose words and music seem to have arrived together. It turned up again on his 1974 live album It's Too Late to Stop Now.

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