The Places of Van Morrison’s Songwriting

The Places of Van Morrison’s Songwriting PDF Author: Geoff Munns
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000810232
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
What can we learn about Van Morrison’s life and work as a songwriter through his songs? This book looks closely at the lyrics and music from a selection of his songs. Some are very well-known - ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘Cleaning Windows’ and ‘The Healing Game’. Others are less familiar. Through these songs the book offers insights into some of the most important ideas that the songwriter has explored across his five-decade plus career, starting from the Them period and extending through his solo albums. These readings show how thinking about Morrison’s use of place provides a specific lens that contributes to a greater understanding of his art. The songs are organized into chapters that reflect many of the important places in Morrison’s work as he ventured professionally and imaginatively away from the places of his upbringing towards a wider musical world. These places are in city streetscapes and country landscapes – in home places of streets and ditches, in the enclosed spaces of rooms, in the expansive reaches of the natural world, in indeterminate and specific foreign lands. A picture emerges of the journey that Van Morrison details through his songs, one that sees him first wandering as a boy through his East Belfast haunts, and then venturing out to a wider world away from this local place.

The Places of Van Morrison’s Songwriting

The Places of Van Morrison’s Songwriting PDF Author: Geoff Munns
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000810232
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
What can we learn about Van Morrison’s life and work as a songwriter through his songs? This book looks closely at the lyrics and music from a selection of his songs. Some are very well-known - ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, ‘Cleaning Windows’ and ‘The Healing Game’. Others are less familiar. Through these songs the book offers insights into some of the most important ideas that the songwriter has explored across his five-decade plus career, starting from the Them period and extending through his solo albums. These readings show how thinking about Morrison’s use of place provides a specific lens that contributes to a greater understanding of his art. The songs are organized into chapters that reflect many of the important places in Morrison’s work as he ventured professionally and imaginatively away from the places of his upbringing towards a wider musical world. These places are in city streetscapes and country landscapes – in home places of streets and ditches, in the enclosed spaces of rooms, in the expansive reaches of the natural world, in indeterminate and specific foreign lands. A picture emerges of the journey that Van Morrison details through his songs, one that sees him first wandering as a boy through his East Belfast haunts, and then venturing out to a wider world away from this local place.

Hymns to the Silence

Hymns to the Silence PDF Author: Peter Mills
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 0826429769
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of every aspect of Van Morrison's artistic career - his influences, lyrical themes, vocal performances, his relationship with America, and more.

Global Popular Music

Global Popular Music PDF Author: Clarence Bernard Henry
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040151922
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 985

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Book Description
Global Popular Music: A Research and Information Guide offers an essential annotated bibliography of scholarship on popular music around the world in a two-volume set. Featuring a broad range of subjects, people, cultures, and geographic areas, and spanning musical genres such as traditional, folk, jazz, rock, reggae, samba, rai, punk, hip-hop, and many more, this guide highlights different approaches and discussions within global popular music research. This research guide is comprehensive in scope, providing a vital resource for scholars and students approaching the vast amount of publications on popular music studies and popular music traditions around the world. Thorough cross-referencing and robust indexes of genres, places, names, and subjects make the guide easy to use. Volume 2, Transnational Discourses of Global Popular Music Studies, covers the geographical areas of North America: United States and Canada; Central America, Caribbean, and South America/Latin America; Europe; Africa and Middle East; Asia; and areas of Oceania: Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, and Pacific Islands. It provides over twenty-four hundred annotated bibliographic entries covering discourses of extensive research that extend beyond the borders of the United States and includes annotated entries to books, book series, book chapters, edited volumes, special documentaries and programming, scholarly journal essays, and other resources that focus on the creative and artistic flows of global popular music.

Astral Weeks

Astral Weeks PDF Author: Ryan H. Walsh
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735221367
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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

The Words and Music of Van Morrison

The Words and Music of Van Morrison PDF Author: Erik Hage
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 031335863X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Van Morrison is primal but sophisticated; he's accessible but inscrutable; he's a complex songwriter and a raw blues shouter; he's a steady influence on the musical scene but wildly unpredictable as well, and it's these complex and often conflicting qualities that make him such a compelling subject for the Singer-Songwriter series. Journalist Erik Hage here eschews a cold, empirical study of structures and influence, and seeks instead more natural and intuitive means of appreciating all that is unique, eclectic, and surprising about Van Morrison's impressive output. In addition to covering almost all of Van Morrison's musical work and offering new readings of many iconic songs, Hage also provides a biographical introduction and a complete discography that can help listeners find new perspective on Morrison's body of work. Even in his darkest and most naked moments-in Astral Weeks for instance-Van Morrison's songs can still suggest something uplifting. Sometimes these two poles are present simultaneously, and at other times they each find distinct expression in a different musical moment. Even on his first solo album, Blowin' Your Mind (which contained the iconic Brown-Eyed Girl) Van Morrison was wrestling with something thornier and deeper, as evidenced by the wrenching T.B. Sheets - a nine-minute opus about the discomfort of visiting a lover in a small room as she lies in bed, wracked with Tuberculosis. Those two songs, at artistic odds with each other and on the same album, are representative of the oppositional forces that fuel much of his work. Hage here provides a guide through all the layers of emotional meaning and musical resonance present in Morrison's work.

Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics

Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics PDF Author: David C. Wright Jr.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666945609
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 167

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Book Description
Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics explores seven decades of lyrics to elucidate themes about the human experience. The opening chapters discuss romantic relationships and break ups. Subsequent chapters consider lyrics describing nostalgia, as well as those about leaving home, going on the road, and returning home. Then, successive chapters examine the outsider in society, those experiencing mental illness, and alcohol and drug use. Next, songs of social and political critique are surveyed, followed by an examination of utopian and dystopian lyrics. The final chapters analyze songs using prophetic voices and those about the afterlife. This survey shows how lyrics convey the lived experience of people in contemporary society.

Small Town Talk

Small Town Talk PDF Author: Barney Hoskyns
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306823217
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
Think "Woodstock" and the mind turns to the seminal 1969 festival that crowned a seismic decade of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But the town of Woodstock, New York, the original planned venue of the concert, is located over 60 miles from the site to which the fabled half a million flocked. Long before the landmark music festival usurped the name, Woodstock-the tiny Catskills town where Bob Dylan holed up after his infamous 1966 motorcycle accident-was already a key location in the '60s rock landscape. In Small Town Talk, Barney Hoskyns re-creates Woodstock's community of brilliant dysfunctional musicians, scheming dealers, and opportunistic hippie capitalists drawn to the area by Dylan and his sidekicks from the Band. Central to the book's narrative is the broodingly powerful presence of Albert Grossman, manager of Dylan, the Band, Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield, and Todd Rundgren-and the Big Daddy of a personal fiefdom in Bearsville that encompassed studios, restaurants, and his own record label. Intertwined in the story are the Woodstock experiences and associations of artists as diverse as Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, and Bobby Charles (whose immortal song-portrait of Woodstock gives the book its title). Drawing on numerous first-hand interviews with the remaining key players in the scene-and on the period when he lived there himself in the 1990s-Hoskyns has produced an East Coast companion to his bestselling L.A. canyon classic Hotel California. This is a richly absorbing study of a vital music scene in a revolutionary time and place.

Lit Up Inside

Lit Up Inside PDF Author: Van Morrison
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571316212
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Lit Up Inside contains the lyrics of about one third of the songs that Van Morrison has written over his 50 year career. In this representative selection from the work of one of the most innovative and enduring songwriters of the last century, the reader will find examples of all the features of the world that Van has created through his work: the back streets and mystic avenues; memories of childhood wonder and of adult work; the chime of church bells and the playing of the radio; the generous naming of other artists and the joy of solitude; love and sharp dealing; consolation and grace.

Roots, Radicals and Rockers

Roots, Radicals and Rockers PDF Author: Billy Bragg
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571327761
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PENDERYN MUSIC BOOK PRIZERoots, Radicals & Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World is the first book to explore this phenomenon in depth - a meticulously researched and joyous account that explains how skiffle sparked a revolution that shaped pop music as we have come to know it. It's a story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Billy traces how the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s.Emerging from the trad-jazz clubs of the early '50s, skiffle was adopted by kids who growing up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. These were Britain's first teenagers, looking for a music of their own in a pop culture dominated by crooners and mediated by a stuffy BBC. Lonnie Donegan hit the charts in 1956 with a version of 'Rock Island Line' and soon sales of guitars rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year. Like punk rock that would flourish two decades later, skiffle was a do-it-yourself music. All you needed were three guitar chords and you could form a group, with mates playing tea-chest bass and washboard as a rhythm section.

Van Morrison

Van Morrison PDF Author: John Collis
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780306808111
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
In an age when image and self-promotion increasingly dominate the rock industry, Van Morrison remains a proud, belligerent outsider. An intensely private man and a revelatory performer, he has communicated more deeply within the limits of rock songwriting—and has been less responsive to the obsessional inquiries of the media—than almost any other artist. Ever since connecting with classic American jazz, blues, and gospel music during his Belfast youth, Van Morrison has stayed one step ahead of fellow musicians, fans, and critics. From the explosive teenage days with Them, through the creation of 1968s seminal Astral Weeks, to the vocal and spiritual experimentation of Veedon Fleece and Into the Music, Morrison has never stopped developing complex lyrical and instrumental visions that defy easy classification. Enjoying commercial success, the recognition of a younger generation, and collaborations ranging from John Lee Hooker to Tom Jones, he continues to dazzle and beguile his audience.In this definitive survey of Van Morrison's life and music, John Collis charts the scale of his achievement and the sources of his creativity, and provides stimulating assessments of his music. Drawing on interviews with those closest to Morrison at every stage of his career, with a full discography and many rare photographs, Van Morrison: Inarticulate Speech of the Heart offers unique insight into one of rock's greatest singer-songwriters and most instantly recognizable voices.