"Van Morrison - Tupelo Honey"

So I've been on a Van Morrison kick this week. Sunday and yesterday I listened to Too Late To Stop Now, a live album from the early '70s that found Van at his peak. I spent all day at work listening to Moondance, the quitessential Van album. And today it's been Tupelo Honey.

I was introduced to Tupelo Honey, like most of Van's work, by my sibling Clif during our summer in Yellowstone a couple of years ago. Van's stuff really grew on me over the course of that summer, to the point that I started searching for Van Morrison albums of my own. First I got Moondance, then I got Tupelo Honey.

The themes and styles of the two albums are rather different, but similar enough that you can tell they were both made by the same artist. Where Moondance was jazzy and concerned with deeply spiritual matters, Tupelo Honey is essentially country and concerned with domestic bliss. The songs have a simple, stately elegance to them, and the uptempo tunes (of which there are a few, including the R&B homage opener, "Wild Night") are bouncy, fun, and sing-along. Van seems incapable of playing the country music straight, though. He keeps inflecting it with gospel and rock/R&B overtones, and it makes for an interesting concoction.

Like much of Van's peak early '70s output, the entire album is worthwhile, with nary a dud amongst these nine tunes. "Wild Night" is an energetic, thoughtful tune about night life, with one of the most recognizable basslines ever laid down; "(Straight to Your Heart) Like a Cannonball" is a fun, whimsical take on love; "Tupelo Honey" is one of Van's most beautiful love songs; "I Wanna Roo You (Scottish Derivative)" is one of the most entertaining songs Van's ever recorded; the closer "Moonshine Whiskey" is a multipart epic with tempo changes and a mention of "hot pants" (though the idea of Van wearing hot pants is a little...um...disturbing. Oh, and don't let Van fool you--he is not, as he claims in the song, "from Arkansas." He's an Irish boy, born and bred in Belfast).

Lyrically, this is one of Van's strongest outtings. He usually takes the tack that less is more with lyrics, relying more on feeling and delivery to make his impact than particularly thought-provoking lyrics (admittedly, this doesn't seem to apply to Moondance, either. But look at His Band and the Street Choir, the album which fell between these two. It's a great record, but the lyrics are very simple and few). Van's meditations on love and domestic bliss, in part inspired by his recent marriage to singer Janet Planet, are thoughtful, warm, and even downright pastoral. This is a Van who isn't searching his soul for the answers (like on Moondance), searching for catharsis (like on Astral Weeks), or haunted by bitterness (as he would be on some of his later albums). He is joyful, confident, and comfortable, and it makes for some of his best lyrics. It definitely makes for one of his best vocal performances.

Tupelo Honey is an album that fits together perfectly, a well-crafted set of tunes that all seem part of a whole. That whole is not a knock out--these songs will not radically alter your conscience, nor will they set the world afire. Rather, this is an album of simple pleasures, a pick-me-up on a cold winter's day. It's one of the albums I always listen to when I'm in a bad mood, because it's hard to stay in said mood when "I Wanna Roo You" is playing. If you have any appreciation for classic rock in general or Van in particular, or if you just happen to like good music, you'll do yourself a favor and go out and buy this album right now. Go on, do it.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Van Morrison, "Starting a New Life"