When Astral Weeks was recorded over half a century ago, Van Morrison was living in fear. He scurried about the streets of Boston at a pace way beyond the typical wayfaring stroll of a folk songwriter. And the Irishman was scampering for good reason: he was hiding from the mob. Following the death of producer Bert Berns, his Bang Records label had fallen into the hands of the mafia. They had previously kept their distance from the creative side of things, but now that the buffer of Berns was no longer, the meddling had begun.
The staunch and stocky Morrison wasn’t one to back down, and he found himself the victim of a beating by a coterie of the family’s cruel, hard-nosed punks following a disagreement. He still refused to resolve it—whatever it was over, now lost to the sands of time. The initial threat they had landed was to reveal his shady visa status and have him deported from the country. When he married his girlfriend, Janet Planet, in a hurry to secure citizenship, they changed tact and threatened his life. He fled New York for Cambridge, Massachusetts.
When he finally did return to a recording studio, enthused by a recent secret gig organised under the nose of any mobsters on the prowl, he was determined to capture some freedom in every sense. With that in mind, he barely even communicated with the jazz musicians he had assembled. Like a musical method actor, he was simply focused on capturing flow. This resulted in an album that many fans and musicians alike have adored for just that reason.
“Astral Weeks was an extremely important record for me,” Bruce Springsteen told Desert Island Discs. “It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine. The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album.” This was, of course, in part because its creator had been experiencing a close brush with the impermanence of life and how music can beautifully whisk you away from that. The track that does that more than most for The Boss is ‘Madame George’.
Speaking about the track he champions as his favourite, the nine-minute epic, he said: “Of course, there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again.”
In fact, it even influenced one of Springsteen’s own tracks. “But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be,” he said, before citing how it inspired ‘New York Serenade’ from his own album, The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. The songs are even near enough an identical length.
However, the main influence it exorcised is clearly the swell of seamless profundity that bubbles up from simplicity in flow. The Boss has always had an eye for such beauty; it’s a facet never far from his subversive stories.
You can find the rest of his choices below.
Bruce Springsteen’s favourite songs:
Elvis Presley – ‘Hound Dog’
The Beatles – ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’
The Rolling Stones – ‘It’s All Over Now’
Van Morrison – ‘Madame George’
Marvin Gaye – ‘What’s Going On’
James Brown – ‘Out Of Sight’
The Four Tops – ‘Baby I Need Your Loving’
Bob Dylan – ‘Like A Rolling Stone’
