More on Music Since I'm confessing my secret love for musicians that would get me thrown out of any respectable scenester gathering, I might as well come totally clean. I have (in this past year of Sopranos, scotch, and dark thoughts) come to love Van Morrison. You probably associate this name with "Moondance" and "Tupelo Honey"--catchy pop tunes played at high school proms and weddings and not exactly the kind of thing that makes one weep. Yet when you get past the "best of" set, you find an incredible treasure. Lester Bangs, the famed Rolling Stone reviewer, describes Astral Weeks as "the rock record with the most significance in my life so far."

I've spent a number of nights in a sort of a trance, alone with the headphone volume up very high, feeling this music more than listening to it. Feeling, as the article describes, like one of those "people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend." On those dark nights Astral Weeks "assumed the quality of a beacon, a light on the far shores of the murk."

Check out Lester's review here: http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/van/reviews/astral.html

Thanks to Todd Fox for turning me onto Van and the above article.