The ruminative force of Morrison’s singing on Weeks was not that far from his early hard-blues attack in the band Them. Astral Weeks was Morrison’s first step toward transcendence as a singer-songwriter, a radical turn away from the AM-radio success of his 1967 hit “Brown Eyed Girl.” The album is still like nothing else in rock, a quiet union of breathtaking opposites: Morrison’s soul-trance reflections on his early life in Belfast and the tension of the chamber-jazz arrangements. When Van Morrison sings, “I believe I’ve transcended,” at the end of “Astral Weeks” - the first song in this full 2008 recital of his historic album of the same name - it is in a warm, grateful growl remarkably like that of the younger man who made the 1968 studio LP.
