Five Van Morrison Songs I Just Met: Finishing up this week of SXSW counter-programming (to be honest, the ratings are tanking) is a track from Van Morrison’s 1980 album
Common One, the listening of which eluded me for 35 years. The reviews I read when it first came out all painted it as an extraordinarily strange album with jazz elements, two 15-minute odysseys called “
Summertime in England” and “
When Heart Is Open,” and no commercial chances whatsoever. I’m happy to report all of that is true, except for the implication that it somehow makes
Common One a mediocre-at-best album. If you’re troubled by a challenged attention span you might not like it so much, but I think it’s a brilliant revelator that amply rewarded the risks Morrison took. No, I didn’t hear a single. I found more than a single. I found at least a seeing-eye double with an extra base on a throwing error.
“Satisfied” is my favorite song on the album, and I freely admit about 50–60% of my love for it is centered around that lethally insane organ part. It’s built on a dyad in which the two keys are separated by a half-step creating a sort of dissonance that throws the song just that much off. The beautiful thing is that this two-note figure recurs
throughout the entire song, which means all six minutes sound like one long nervous tic. Sign me up. It does sound a little like a Steely Dan outtake, but I’m one of those people who likes Steely Dan so that’s ducky with me. A nice little big-band call-and-response brings the whole thing around.
All right, that’s it for the Van-tensity of these last few weeks. I think we can move on.
Comments