Van Morrison: Keep It Simple

By Steve Morley

For more than forty years, Irish-born musician Van Morrison has been one of rock music’s greatest anomalies. For starters, he’s not really a rock artist, and he makes no secret of his disdain for the media and marketing machinery that saddled him with the “rock star” label in the early 1970s. While the embrace of his blues-and-soul-rooted sound by rock critics and fans provided a far larger arena than he might have found elsewhere, it also resulted in a scrutiny of his work and his personal life that set him at odds with the very system that sustains him. His mission these days is twofold: to distance himself from the nuisance of commerce and to get on with making music that’s true to his vision. The latter objective is the easier one to appreciate on his latest album, Keep It Simple, a low-key affair that hits few peaks but shows Morrison focused and in fine form at age 62.

His preoccupation with the travails of celebrity life informs “School of Hard Knocks,” which accuses the press of spreading propaganda, while “How Can a Poor Boy?” finds the singer rejecting the veneration that prominence brings and imploring his listeners not to believe media-propagated myths. “I’ve been anointed, been appointed/ Even been magnified/ Spied a chapel all of gold/ The priest was laying down with the swine/ How can a poor boy get this message to you?”)

His ironic use of religious terminology makes an effective point about idol worship, though lines like “Had my congregation/ When I was a shepherd of men” may also allude to the unwanted speculation that arose during the 1980s, when Morrison’s work reflected the spiritual direction he was pursuing. Songs like these give the average listener little to relate to, though Morrison does touch upon universal themes on tracks like “Song of Home,” which revisits the imagery of “Into the Mystic,” from his enduring Moondance album. The seamless melding of Celtic, country and gospel elements heard on the yearning track lends it a quality both earthly and eternal.

The search for sanctuary addressed on this cut and “End of the Land” can be directly traced to the discontent displayed on “No Thing,” in which a pessimistic-sounding Morrison shrugs off the world outside his window over a fittingly nonchalant groove. (“I watch them come and go/ I’m fed up with the status quo/ And I’m feeling too tired to start all over again/ ‘cause I know that it ain’t gonna change no thing.”)

Morrison’s most accessible lyric comes on “Soul,” where his broad exploration of this elusive attribute moves beyond the self-referential tendency he so frequently favors. (“Soul is a feeling, a feeling deep within/ Soul is not the color of your skin/ Soul is the essence, essence from within/ It is where everything begins.”)

He labors admirably to define the indefinable and manages to link “soul” with one’s character and core nature, clarifying that he’s talking about a universal property and not simply charisma. When it comes to soul as a musical and emotional quantity, though, Van Morrison clearly possesses more than most. It’s the ingredient that allows his organic music to transcend his complexity, and the reason why Keep it Simple lives up to its title more often than not.

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