Readhowyouwant 16 point large print. Van Morrison, says Greil Marcus, remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music. When Astral Weeks was released in 1968, it was largely ignored. When it was re-released as a live album in 2009 it reached the top of the Billboard charts, a first for any Van Morrison recording. The wild swings in the music, mirroring the swings in Morrison's success and in people's appreciation (or lack of it) of his music, make Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in popular modern music, and a perfect subject for the wise and insightful scrutiny of Greil Marcus, one of America's most dedicated cultural critics. This book is Marcus's quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day. In these dislocations Marcus finds the singer on his own artistic quest precisely to reach some extreme musical threshold, the moments that are not enclosed by the will or the intention of the performer but which somehow emerge at the limits of the musician and his song.

"Van Morrison," says Greil Marcus, "remains a singer who can be compared to no other in the history of modern popular music." When Astral Weeks was released in 1968, it was largely ignored. When it was rereleased as a live album in 2009 it reached the top of the Billboard charts, a first for any Van Morrison recording. The wild swings in the music, mirroring the swings in Morrison's success and in people's appreciation (or lack of it) of his music, make Van Morrison one of the most perplexing and mysterious figures in popular modern music, and a perfect subject for the wise and insightful scrutiny of Greil Marcus, one of America's most dedicated cultural critics. This book is Marcus's quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through the extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day. In these dislocations Marcus finds the singer on his own artistic quest precisely to reach some extreme musical threshold, the moments that are not enclosed by the will or the intention of the performer but which somehow emerge at the limits of the musician and his song.

This book is a quest to understand Van Morrison's particular genius through a close look at the most extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day: sometimes entire songs, sometimes single words or even the guttural spaces between words that become musical events in themselves.

Van Morrison is an enigma. The legendary rock star who wrote and recorded such influential albums as Astral Weeks and Moondance and has mesmerised millions live is also a reclusive and troubled man who'll do anything to avoid publicity. Through interviews with friends, through the music itself and through painstaking research, Clinton Heylin reveals for the first time the tensions in Morrison s life. From a Belfast childhood and marriage break up to the recording of classic songs and albums, this is Van Morrison laid bare.

For centuries, pipe organs stood at the summit of musical and technological achievement, admired as the most complex and intricate mechanisms the human race had yet devised. In All The Stops, New York Times journalist Craig Whitney journeys through the history of the American pipe organ and brings to life the curious characters who have devoted their lives to its music. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, organ music was wildly popular in America. Organ builders in New York and New England could hardly fill the huge demand for both concert hall and home organs. Master organbuilders found ingenious ways of using electricity to make them sound like orchestras. Organ players developed cult followings and bitter rivalries. One movement arose to restore to American organs the clarity and precision that baroque organs had in centuries past, while another took electronic organs to the rock concert halls, where younger listeners could be found. But while organbuilders and organists were fighting with each other, popular audiences lost interest in the organ. Today, organs are beginning to make a comeback in concert halls and churches across America. Craig Whitney brings the story to life and up to date in a humorous, engaging book about the instruments and vivid personalities that inspired his lifelong passion: the great art of the majestic pipe organ. Hear the sounds of some of the pipe organs featured in ALL THE STOPS

A mind-expanding dive into a lost chapter of 1968, featuring the famous and forgotten: Van Morrison, folkie-turned-cult-leader Mel Lyman, Timothy Leary, James Brown, and many more Van Morrison's Astral Weeks is an iconic rock album shrouded in legend, a masterpiece that has touched generations of listeners and influenced everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Martin Scorsese. In his first book, acclaimed musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh unearths the album's fascinating backstory--along with the untold secrets of the time and place that birthed it: Boston 1968. On the 50th anniversary of that tumultuous year, Walsh's book follows a criss-crossing cast of musicians and visionaries, artists and hippie entrepreneurs, from a young Tufts English professor who walks into a job as a host for TV's wildest show (one episode required two sets, each tuned to a different channel) to the mystically inclined owner of radio station WBCN, who believed he was the reincarnation of a scientist from Atlantis. Most penetratingly powerful of all is Mel Lyman, the folk-music star who decided he was God, then controlled the lives of his many followers via acid, astrology, and an underground newspaper called Avatar. A mesmerizing group of boldface names pops to life in Astral Weeks: James Brown quells tensions the night after Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated; the real-life crimes of the Boston Strangler come to the movie screen via Tony Curtis; Howard Zinn testifies for Avatar in the courtroom. From life-changing concerts and chilling crimes, to acid experiments and film shoots, Astral Weeks is the secret, wild history of a unique time and place. One of LitHub's 15 Books You Should Read This March

'This mix of genuine humility and hard-won hubris, of mysticism and technical mastery ... makes Van Morrison quite simply, and quite indisputably, "The Bard of Belfast".' Paul Muldoon If I ventured in the slipstream Between the viaducts of your dreams Keep 'Er Lit is the second volume of Van Morrison's collected lyrics containing one hundred and twenty songs from across his storied career. It contains love songs, work songs, songs about the pains and anxieties of existence, songs of consolation, songs about various kinds of spiritual quest and the realms of the mystical, and songs which deal with healing and reconciliation, both with the self and with others. Then there are the songs of memory and of childhood; songs about the natural world and about the perspectives it can provide on time. Taken together with Lit Up Inside , this volume gives an overview of his fifty-year career, revealing why he is celebrated as one of the most innovative and enduring songwriters of our time.