While so many artists his age are simply living on past glories, Van Morrison is on a creative tear, still searching and climbing to the higher ground. He’s released some smoking jazz albums with Hammond hummer Joe DeFrancesco, and with this one he sounds like he’s on an R&B mode, mixing his voice that improves with age with a Caravan soulful groove.
He’s got fourteen of his own new tunes here with guitar stud Jay Berliner on seven of the tracks, as well as a duet with the Righteously blue-eyed soul Brother Bill Medley, with the entire album feeling like a late night at the local VFW. “If We Wait For The Mountains”, a tuen co-written with Don Black) has Morrison in a homespun lilt, while he sounds right at home on the bluesy shuffle of “Nobody In Charge” and fills the room up with a grey smoke on the title track as well as the slinky “You Don’t Understand.” His work with Medley on “Fame Will Eat The Soul” sounds like the well lived warnings of a Troubadour, while he’s reflective on the soulful “Does Love Conquer All,” with his usual well-traveled observations of man’s predicament this side of heaven.
Only Morrison is able to make the deep issues of life sound like you should be dancing to them, and he does it on the fun boogie of “Early Days” as well as on the casual church mood of “Up On Broadway.” He can hit the heart as well as tap the feat, a rare quality for travelling minstrels these days.