Down The Road

We are back on familiar ground, you might say. But at best that claim would only be partially true. Because, when you’re out there on the road, the ground beneath our feet keeps shifting and changing, all the time. It’s in the nature of things.

This is an all-new Van Morrison album, his first proper Van album in three years. It is hardly his most demanding outing: Down The Road isn’t trading in quite the same currency as Inarticulate Speech of the Heart or No Guru No Method No Teacher. But, then, that isn’t its ambition. Van hasn’t the same appetite for excavation as he evinced in the ’80s. Those records were exercises in spiritual archaeology. For the most part, Down The Road stays above ground.

No point here in demanding Astral Weeks Part 2 or Rave On John Donne Revisited either. Instead, what we find is an artist on top of his game, treating us to a thoroughly competent and engaging exposition of what he can do. Professional time! Van is in a relatively relaxed frame of mind – for him – by the sound of it and the songs he has chosen for the record are direct and strong. The focus is on the life of the working musician and what it does to those who are fortunate – or misfortunate – enough to have pursued the calling. And of course a bit more besides.

Down The Road, then, is an album about the blues. It goes much further than that in musical terms, reflecting Van’s command of the language of popular music. Folk, blues, jazz, soul and Irish – Van draws on all of these strains with aplomb. But in the end the music is welded together into a cohesive whole by the uniqueness of the voice – still a marvellous instrument – and by the recurring themes of beauty, memory, loss and the struggle to belong.

‘Down The Road’ sets the scene. “Well it’s down the road I go,” Van intones, “I got those worried/ Lonesome homesick Jones/ Way on down the road.” He’s being pursued by dreams and reflections, by memories that keep haunting him. “Further on down the road,” he exclaims, “Trying to find my way back home.” The spiritual implication is there but it is lightly drawn.

The Van who wrote ‘Come Running’ and ‘Days Like This’ and dozens of other great popular songs is to the fore on Down The Road, most of the tracks weighing in at a length, and clocking a mood, that wouldn’t debar them from daytime radio play.

The first single ‘Hey Mr. DJ’ finds him in reflective mode, listening to the radio. “Gonna turn it way down low/Leave it on all night long,” he promises, harking back to the time when a whole new world of music came at us through the ether, and jazz and the blues infiltrated the European consciousness via American Forces Network and Radio Luxembourg. The saxes swirl, the doo-wop backing vocals take rock’n’roll back to where it once belonged and there is a masterful and relaxed feel, with Van scatting his way out evocatively at the finale. But there is a hint of dislocation and desperation, even in something as sweet as this. “Play me Rainbow 66,” he pleads, “’Cos I’m drifting like a ship out on the sea/And I just don’t know what’s coming next.”

However difficult and uncertain the business of life, in the spirit of the romantic poets, Van has always been able to find a sense of wonder and of rapture in the natural world. He does it here on ‘Meet Me In The Indian Summer’ and ‘Steal My Heart Away’, two love songs that reflect a beautiful simplicity of vision – and either or both of which should be a hit for someone along the way, if not for Van himself now. The marvellous Zen of ‘Coney Island’ is recalled in ‘Steal My Heart Away’: “On a morning in May like this,” he sings, “We see the heather on the hill/ There’s a place on the mountainside/ Where the world is standing still.” It’s an illusion of course, but the lilt and the melody and the gentle climax of the music make you feel just for an instant that anything is possible.

Van has always insisted that the songs are the thing and that they shouldn’t be taken to mean anything more than what they are. But he does draw on his own life and experiences, offering flashes of insight into the way things were and therefore, by extension, the way they are.

Like ‘Cleaning Windows’, which also evokes the Belfast of his youth, there’s a Zen undercurrent to ‘Choppin’ Wood’. It is, however, primarily a tribute to a generation who placed their obligations to family and children first and who shaped their lives – or allowed their lives to be shaped – around that constant. It is told in that brilliantly spare, narrative voice that Van has mastered, a life captured in three verses and a chorus: “When you came back off the boats you didn’t want to go anywhere/ You sit down to TV in your favourite chair/ You watch the big picture fade away down at Harland and Wolff/ But you still kept on choppin’ wood.”

Beckett’s famous declaration – I can’t go on, but I’ll go on – has never been far from the surface of Van’s music. It’s there in the hard pragmatism of ‘Man Has To Struggle’ and in the be-bop piss take of ‘All Work And No Play’. And it is there in the sardonic and witty ‘Whatever Happened To PJ Proby?’, in which Van plays a man who has lost his moorings and his faith. “Nothing to relate to anymore,” he complains, “Unless you wanna be mediocre.” But this is not an exercise in sneering at fallen heroes. It is about the way in which life happens and you suddenly wake up to find that it is later than you thought, much later. “I saw a bus coming and I had to get on it,” he says about the world that he plugged into, a musician’s world, “and I’m still trying to find my way back.” And when he’s asking whatever happened to PJ Proby, he’s also asking a far deeper and more disturbing question, one that in the end must haunt us all. “Whatever happened to all those dreams?”, he asks, mystified. “And whatever happened to me?”

There is no doubt about the sense of loss that imbues the album. Van isn’t as young as he was, and he sees – as he put it not so long ago – that precious time really is slipping away. It’s there like an ache in ‘The Beauty Of The Days Gone By’, where memories of what he once was and felt are a more powerful stimulant than anything that is available here, in the present. And in that, there is an inherent admission – that in the end we are In a race it is impossible to win, against the vicious ravages of time.

Strange. Down The Road is a light album in the Van scheme of things. It is sunny and beautiful in places. But in the end the evening shadows fall, and, on the final track ‘Fast Train’, we are left out there, still moving, and knowing neither where we came from nor where we are going. “Oh, keep on moving, keep on moving on a fast train/Going nowhere across the desert sand, through the barren waste/Going nowhere on a fast train/Going nowhere on a fast train.”

And not an easy chair in sight.