“Moondance” by Van Morrison

"Moondance" is the title track of Van Morrison's third studio album, Moondance, from 1970, and it swings like nothing else on rock radio: a finger-snapping, jazz-club walk with Morrison crooning like he owns the night. He wrote it and produced it with Lewis Merenstein, and Elliot Scheiner handled the mix.

Oddly, Morrison sat on it: the single didn't appear until September 1977, a full seven and a half years on from the album, paired with "Cold Wind in August" from A Period of Transition, and it only scraped to 92 on the Billboard Hot 100. None of that mattered in the long run. It became the song Morrison plays in concert more than any other.

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