Van Morrison – Remembering Now (Exile Productions/Virgin Records)
Van Morrison fans tend to be loyal. My friend Tim named his dog after the musician. And back when I was 21, I was besotted enough with Van to go to Ireland and take a train south of Dublin just to walk The Streets of Arklow (a favourite song off 1974’s Veedon Fleece).
But loyalty’s been a rocky road. There have been break-ups along the way. I lost interest along the way with patchy albums and, to quote another friend, ‘stinkers’, like his 2022 What’s it Gonna Take? that raved against Covid lockdowns.
But here we are in 2025, the Belfast Cowboy is two months short of 80 and he’s released Remembering Now, his forty seventh (yes, 47th) studio album.
At 68 minutes it’s a substantial and satisfying listen. Transcendent at times.
Opener, Down to Joy, entered the world on the soundtrack to the Kenneth Branagh’s 2021 film Belfast. On hearing it at the cinema, I was astonished – here when I least expected it – was a light and breezy vintage Van.
A song, celebrating the possibility of joy within troubles. Back to the future. Mining that golden seam of contentment, enlightenment and joy.
The pleasures and nods to the past continue. If it Wasn’t for Ray is a jaunty homage to one of Van’s great influences. (If it wasn’t for Ray I wouldn’t be who I am today, he sings. Ray reinvented soul, rhythm and blues, country and western too).
It’s as if we are party to a chapter of Van’s memoir; an elaboration on the nod to Ray offered in These Dreams of You (Moondance, 1970). (And Ray Charles was shot down/But he got up to do his best). The immortal Ray shooting through Van’s dreamscape.
For the full hagiography, on the live Too Late to Stop Now he covers (as well as Ray) Bobby Bland, Sam Cooke, Sonny Boy Williamson and Willie Dixon. These were the influences in his early years, the vinyl in his father’s collection. So, this song is no casual tribute. No, if it wasn’t for Ray Charles (and the rest), Van would not be the Man.
The cover’s stylised autumn leaves hint of the past too. They image-check another album cover: 1984’s A Sense of Wonder. Maybe Van particularly loves that album as Haven’t Lost My Sense of Wonder reiterates the earlier song’s joyful immersion in beauty and landscape. This time round, his background vocalists again offer nuanced accompaniment: I’ve had my fill, I’ve been through the mill, please be still… A call to embrace the inner calm that contemplatives know.
Love, Lover and Beloved addresses aspiration rather than personal relationship (These are the avenues through which we offer ourselves). A song not as preachy as the words suggest but words every bit as deep as the best of preachers might offer.
As if declaring enough lofty advice for now, Van cuts into the grittiness of his own life, confessing he’s always Cutting Corners. Great catchy tune and bouncy lyric. No wonder it’s a single. The sax solo is sublime.
The breezy Back to Writing Love Songs is a simple, almost sugary, tune and has the Van phrase repetition habit. Suggests a return to beginnings, its country lilt a throwback to the Tupelo Honey (1971) era. A song written about writing. Thematically like Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s Writing (1975) but of course no connection. A meditative repetition that could only be Van.
If that one’s about the act of writing, the following track The Only Love I Ever Need is You is the superlative outcome. Almost hymn-like in its persuasive expression of devotion. This is a gem. Simply stunning. Echoes of Someone Like You (off 1987’s Poetic Champions Compose). Strings, piano and discreet background vocals carry the melody. Its brevity adds to the song’s impact.
Memories of Visions is one of Van’s sung-but-almost-spoken meditations on those ineffable moments – dreamt or lived – that, once joined up, make sense in a mystical way. (Communion with the spirit, we had a state profound). Again, we hear the phrase sense of wonder. Influences here of Celtic traditions, early Christian mystics, esoteric philosophers. He draws on a deep well.
Its testament to the embeddedness of Van’s spiritual sensibility that he can repeat the word communion in a song and not be dismissed as part of some niche religious genre. But of course, as in Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming /Saved phase, the purity of art is such that the words can be either savoured for their meaning or heard as sounds contributing to a joyous whole.
To percussive beat and Hammond organ, When The Rains Came is a narrative infused with acceptance and serenity; a gospel-styled counterpoint to the high energy of that earlier rain-prompted song And It Stoned Me (Moondance, 1970).
Colourblind is almost whimsical with lyrics like I’m sitting in the sun/trying to get brown/ I left the blues behind/ when I became colourblind. Veiled disdain for race-based discrimination, maybe. Just a little too clever for my liking. But he’s forgiven as the track’s highlight is the sax which arrives into the song as if a dueting voice.
Take me down to the mystic avenue he sings in Stomping Ground another love letter to Belfast childhood origins in the vein of Cypress Avenue (Astral Weeks, 1968) Orangefield (Avalon Sunset, 1989) and Hyndforth Steet (Hymns to the Silence, 1991).
Once in a Lifetime Feelings has Van singing its worth repeating everything I’ve said and the BVs offer that as call and response. A languid cello offers a bridge. Open roads, so much to say, never felt this way before…vintage romantic Van.
The title track, Remembering Now, is another homage to Van’s home and origins of self (back to square one, this is where it all began.) This is who I am mantra-like. This is more than recalling the specifics of childhood ; it’s an eighth decade dawning moment (remembering now how it was and is now; close your eyes and feel the presence).
Less about remembering a time or place but an exhortation to self to remember to dwell in the now; to know that whatever the past has been and future might be, now is all we have, so live it fully with awareness.
A flourish of string begins the final and longest track Stretching Out. As implied in the title it’s an expansive mystical reflection on a life lived fully. Van’s soaring vocals stretch out, seeing the ancient highway, all along the coastline checking it out (and with those lines name-checking song titles off Days Like This (1995) and Wavelength (1979) as well as My garden, your garden (In the Garden, from No Guru No Teacher, No Method 1986). Sitting pretty, he sings, repeated and repeated.
This is Van’s spirituality in glowing colours. The browns and oranges of autumn. Hints of mortality; a looking down the years and across a life of song. Reflecting on how, in the stretched out ‘now’ of performance, it all converges: life, love, and the hint of the eternal.
As one who has followed Van’s output off and on over the years, and who once led me to find Cypress Avenue in Belfast, this may seem a heretical statement. But part of me hopes this is last Van Morrison record.
There’s just too little chance another being this good. I may well be wrong but I doubt Remembering Now can be surpassed as a farewell statement of his musical genius.
Robin Kearns
Remembering Now is out now on Exile/Virgin