Let Me Send You Glad Tidings

Album: Van Morrison, Moondance, n.d. (cassette reissue)

Worst Tack: "Come Running"

Lasting Memory: While I was sitting in a Blacksburg hippie coffee shop/ice cream parlor named Gillie's with a couple of friends on some cold, drizzly February night in 1990, a guy I kind of knew named James (I'm pretty sure, wouldn't swear) appeared out of nowhere and started singing along with a three-piece jazz combo that was playing "Moondance" near the front door of the establishment. You could have heard a pin drop, as everyone in the place -- struck by how perfectly the song, James' voice, the weather, and the general mood of being young and worldly wise/sheltered all came together -- fell silent and lost themselves in the vibe.

Everyone needs to experience more moments like that.

Fortunately, all anyone needs to do to set the scene for such reverie is to play Van Morrison's Moondance. Ranked 65th on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, Moondance is the album you need when you just want to feel great about being alive while not completely forgetting that the world isn't always the greatest place to be living. (RS pollsters actually ranked Morrison's Astral Weeks higher on the GOAT list at No. 19, but since I don't own that album and can't unequivocally affirm that I have ever heard any songs off of Astral Weeks, I'll stick with my assertion that Moondance is Morrison's masterwork and add that Astral Weeks can go suck it.)

Every song on Moondance would be a career-maker for most other singer-songwriter -- even "Come Running," which I tagged as the album's worst track only because I couldn't see the point of listing every other song as the album's best. "Come Running" is a good song. In fact, it was the American single when Warner Bros. released Moondance in 1970. But set alongside with such timeless classics as "Caravan," "Everyone," "Into the Mystic," and "Glad Tidings," "Come Running" comes up a little short. Maybe it should give up smoking and drinking and really get itself in shape for the next listening.

For all of the greatness of its individual songs, though the best ting about Moondance is that it is a completely coherent album. In writing, recording, and sequencing the songs, Morrison and his band and production team took great care in constructing a collection of songs that have similar lyrical themes, similar musical sounds, and similar effects on listeners. As I blog through my music collection, I'm finding that most of the albums I praise highly are the ones that are albums qua albums. I'll try to remember to write more about this when I get to my Tragically Hip CDs sometime in, oh, 2011 at the current pace, because the Hip more than any other band I could name tends to pick unique moods and riffs to build entire album's worths of songs around.

For now, I'll just sign off and look forward to transitioning from the sublime to the ridiculous when I get around to making my next post on:

Up Next: Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love, 1982