Van Morrison
Van Morrison
Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison, OBEis a Northern Irish singer, songwriter and musician. He has received six Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016 he was knighted for his musical achievements and his services to tourism and charitable causes in Northern Ireland...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth31 August 1945
CityBelfast, Northern Ireland
I write songs. Then, I record them. And, later, maybe I perform them on stage. That's what I do. That's my job. Simple.
Performing was the natural thing originally and the rest of it [records and so on] is just like offshoots of that. That's how I see it anyway.
When I started out in this business, I was a performer before I was a songwriter, I was a performer before I was recording. Performing is the roots. That's where it all came from. You didn't start out doing it because you wanted to make an album.
What excited me when I first came into it was the performing aspect and doing blues-oriented material, rock/blues oriented stuff, basic stuff, basic what they call rock 'n' roll.
I'd been performing in bands since I was 12 which represented, at that point, about 16 years of playing music.
Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.
My records do not require a lot of thought of 'What is this?' and 'What is that?' That would be too contrived for me.
A lot of people who were writing when I came through originally as a singer-songwriter have disappeared.
I think when you get past your second album, it all becomes something of a routine. So you have to struggle against that, find a way of making what you do sound fresh and new each time.
I put out records to this day that are not necessarily in a sequence of anything. Some could be written a while back, some not. There is no set pattern.
The future is keeping you out of the present time.
The theory is that you don't play a song the same way twice because it's jazz. That's where I'm coming from.
What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
I don't have any regrets about the album [ Veedon Fleece ]. But it's the same old story - an album is basically 35 or 40 minutes of what you do. It's 'part' of what you do.