Van Morrison Quotes
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It was like I had evolved to a certain stage where I was stuck in this songwriter bag as an image. But basically at heart, I'm a rocker. And I still am. But I was caught up in the singer/songwriter bag and I wasn't really enjoying it.
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Jazz goes into folk music, into rock music. Jazz is in practically everything except classical music where they're reading the same music all the time, the same way, the same tempo every night.
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What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
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It's like something happened to you that caused you to do what you do...you heard something somewhere, you felt something about this music that was definitely part of your own vision. That's what the whole thing is like.
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I like [George] Benson because I just like it. I like that kind of style. I don't like the broken up kind of style. I don't like where you play for 16 bars and then break it up into what somebody's version of what birds twittering sounds like, or what the sound of the city is, or what New York sounds like.
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My responsibility is to fulfil what that natural thing is. The thing that I dislike about pop rock Top 40 music is that it's not natural.
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The music I really like to get off on is the old rhythm 'n' blues and rock 'n' roll stuff... that's what I really dig. And I also dig to sing ballads as well. And I also dig writing my own songs. I was just trying to find a way of integrating the whole thing, taking a look at the total picture.
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When you perform live, it's a different trip - it's different energy. I just felt a conflict between both of the trips. I was trying to evaluate what it meant for me to be a singer/songwriter and what that whole thing all meant.
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What I like is natural music. It's like I was born with a gift to do something naturally, which I have no choice but to followup on.
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I was like one of those newspapers, those periodicals. There's all different kinds of alcoholics. There's the everyday kind: that's the consistent one. That's what people think an alcoholic is-but an alcoholic is basically just someone who's allergic to alcohol. That's all it means. It's just an allergy.
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If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dreams, where immobile steel rims crack and the ditch in the back roads stop. Could you find me?
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I don't like to condemn people because what that means is that you're only condemning yourself about a part of you that you can't stand.
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Sometimes you do know where the ideas are coming from and sometimes you don't. You might get a song coming through that you just don't know about.
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What excited me when I first came into it was the performing aspect and doing blues-oriented material, rock/blues oriented stuff, basic stuff, basic what they call rock 'n' roll.
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I just wanted to stop and try to get some perspective. [ A Period of Transition] it was just a matter of wanting to review the whole thing...to try and get some relationship to what I was doing.
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[You Got To Make It Through The World] it's kind of a survival song. Survival is what's happening and it's basically a song about that.
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These are the days of the endless summer, these are the days, the time is now. There is no past, there's only future, there's only here, there's only now.
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I felt kind of bored at the prospect of writing some more of my own songs because I really wasn't saying what I wanted to say.
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See the man on the TV with a phony smile. Bring you up, bring you down, he can turn your head around.
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[Rock 'n' roll] music started out with some cat banging a log with a couple of pieces of stick. He sent a message across a river and although the cat on the other side receiving the message didn't know the exact words, he did understand basically something about what was being communicated.
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My experiences with dope were not good for me. I had to go another route. Because in my experience, dope didn't give me those insights.
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Laying underneath the stars Can be so much fun Especially when you're feeling good When you're with the one you love.
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You have to understand a bit about the poetry of the blues to know where the references are coming from.
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I like to see people reaching back for the roots and for the reason why. Not intellectually, but just for the gut feeling of what it's all about.