About four months ago, I bought the Van Morrison album "Astral Weeks" on vinyl. For those of you who know Van Morrison, this is considered to be one of his best albums (though it turns out, he himself never thought much of it. He just created it as a way to pay the bills). The title track is one of the most beautiful on the album, and one of my favorite songs ever. Around the same time that I bought the album, I went looking on YouTube for a possible video of the title track. The first one that came up was a live cover done by Glen Hansard. The minute this guy opened his mouth, I knew I had come upon something really special. (You may remember Hansard as one of the main characters in the movie "Once".) There was a quality in his voice that captivated me, and when he uttered the words in the chorus my heart just ached. It still does, and I'm still trying to figure out why.
Hansard doesn't use all of the lyrics that Morrison did, but it doesn't in anyway take away the power of his performance. This song is about desperation, but not in a pathetic sense. It's about a longing for things to be different, to start over. ("Could you find me?/Would you kiss-a my eyes/Lay me down in the silence easy/To be born again.") If you look at the full lyrics here, you can see that this is all about a relationship that is ending, or struggling, or has already ended. He wants to be found by his love, almost like a lost child being found by his mother. He wants the struggle to be over, for the complexity to disappear and be left with one who will always love him, will always find him, and never let him go. He's battling between still loving this person, and realizing that things aren't the way they should be and that it's probably time to go. It's a realistic message, and yet the music behind it makes it poetic and ethereal. It's both relatable and somehow seperate from our existence. I guess this is what really good music can do.
But back to Hansard's performance. He embodies the message of this song by the way he sings it, by the way he passionately strums his beat up guitar. The gentle desperation in his voice as he sings, "Would you find me?" gives way to outrage as he screams, "Don't you point that finger at me, no!" and crazily strums away between two chords as if he's trying to tear his own heart apart to show his anguish. It's perfect, and it gets me every time. I must have posted that video to my Facebook profile at least three times. I want people to get it, to understand the power and emotion behind this little-over-three-minute performance; to feel every word sung not only sink into the soul, but rake across the skin as it makes its way in. . .and to breathe easy and deep while it all happens.
I know it seems silly to be so emotionally attached to one little song, but I'm a firm believer that music is the sound the soul makes. And I'm not the only one who feels this way. According to an article from Wikipedia (yeah, I know), Lester Bangs wrote of the album: "What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend." All of this in an album. A man struggles between love and anger and desperation in one little song. And another man picks up his beat up guitar, gently tells the crowd in his lilting Irish accent, "I'm gonna play you a Van Morrison song," and succeeds in making every phrase sung come alive with the passion and complex emotion it was meant to have. Beautiful.
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