According to Planet, he was influenced by Bob Dylan, who had just moved out of town when Morrison arrived. Īfter recording Astral Weeks, Morrison moved with his wife, Janet Planet, to a home on a mountain top in the Catskills near Woodstock, a hamlet in upstate New York with an artistic community. Although it was later acclaimed by critics, its collection of lengthy, acoustic, revelatory folk jazz songs was not well received by consumers at the time and the album proved to be a commercial failure. Smith bought out Morrison's Bang contract, and he was able to record his first album for Warner Bros., Astral Weeks, that year. Records executive Joe Smith, who had seen the singer perform at Boston's Catacombs nightclub in August 1968. When the producer unexpectedly died later that year, Morrison was offered a record deal by Warner Bros. Morrison wrote songs for Moondance at a mountain-top home in the Catskills (view from Overlook Mountain pictured).Īfter leaving the rock band Them, Morrison met record producer Bert Berns in New York City and recorded his first solo single, " Brown Eyed Girl", in March 1967 for Berns' Bang Records. In 2013, the album's remastered deluxe edition was released to similar acclaim.
Among the most acclaimed records in history, Moondance frequently ranks in professional listings of the greatest albums. It helped establish Morrison as a major artist in popular music, while several of its songs became staples on FM radio in the early 1970s. Moondance was an immediate critical and commercial success. The music incorporated soul, jazz, pop, and Irish folk sounds into songs about finding spiritual renewal and redemption in worldly matters such as nature, music, romantic love, and self-affirmation. Its lively rhythm and blues/ rock music was the style he would become most known for in his career. The album found Morrison abandoning the abstract folk jazz compositions of Astral Weeks in favour of more formally composed songs, which he wrote and produced entirely himself. There, he met the musicians that would record the album with him at New York City's A & R Studios in August and September 1969. album Astral Weeks (1968), Morrison moved to upstate New York with his wife and began writing songs for Moondance. After the commercial failure of his first Warner Bros. It was released on 27 January 1970 by Warner Bros. Moondance is the third studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison.