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The Places of Van Morrison’s Songwriting: Venturing in the Slipstream

By (author) Geoff Munns

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normal price: R 6 071.95

Price: R 5 464.95

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| book description |

What can we learn about Van Morrisonâ€™s life and work as a songwriter through his songs? This book looks closely at the lyrics and music from a selection of his songs. Some are very well-known - â€˜Brown Eyed Girlâ€™, â€˜Cleaning Windowsâ€™ and â€˜The Healing Gameâ€™. Others are less familiar. Through these songs the book offers insights into some of the most important ideas that the songwriter has explored across his five-decade plus career, starting from the Them period and extending through his solo albums. These readings show how thinking about Morrisonâ€™s use of place provides a specific lens that contributes to a greater understanding of his art. The songs are organized into chapters that reflect many of the important places in Morrisonâ€™s work as he ventured professionally and imaginatively away from the places of his upbringing towards a wider musical world. These places are in city streetscapes and country landscapes â€“ in home places of streets and ditches, in the enclosed spaces of rooms, in the expansive reaches of the natural world, in indeterminate and specific foreign lands. A picture emerges of the journey that Van Morrison details through his songs, one that sees him first wandering as a boy through his East Belfast haunts, and then venturing out to a wider world away from this local place.