Beside You/Sweet Thing/Almost Independence Day

VINYL FORMAT. "Beside You" and "Sweet Thing" taken from the album Astral Weeks. "Almost Independence Day" taken from the album Saint Dominic's Preview. Compiled by Paul Nickerson and Francis Englehardt for Slow To Speak. "Memory reverberates with more vivacity than the experience itself. Our entire tradition of recollection and narrative reflects this truth. We look back, assigning a vocabulary unspeakable at the time of original beauty, and through this articulation, memory takes on new forms of life autonomous to the physical and temporal constraints of experience. The recollection of song, it's capturing of moments of deeply personal and singularly individual is an art that only few can master with such skill and perfection as the legendary Van Morrison. This latest Slow To Speak reissue brings to light some of his most breathtaking masterpieces, unsolicited by the perverse necessities of our popular airwaves and yet still demanding the attention of any modern masterpiece. His unguarded soulfulness in recollecting the simple beauties of desire shines through with disarming simplicity, and at his best (here), Morrison stands alone in his capacity to capture the moment of eternal magnificence, that heart-wrenching and often tragic recollection of love gained, lost - but never forgotten. The epitome of that inexpressible fluttering of sentimental longing, Morrison's deeply personal music fulfills the urgent and inherent need we all share to revisit with poetic certainty and respectful morning those moments of lost beauty that still shimmer in our memory with the strength of our last sentenced uttered. Like any artist of eternal importance, Morrison's music becomes our music with time, his narrative ours, as we impose our own story onto his canvas with the ease of any universal medium of sincere emotional expression. Just listen to 'Sweet Thing' and the epic necessity of Morrison's music will reveal itself within your own memory as a piece of eternal beauty fit for the universal experience of common passion." Silkscreened lettering on jacket.