Van Morrison 34: Down The Road

It can be tiresome to trawl through a legacy artist’s ongoing catalog when even the artist in question avers that he’s just doing a job. Van Morrison has never felt compelled to justify his albums; he simply records them and puts them out, and considers any status in the grand pantheon as moot, but somehow still deserving of awe.

Unfortunately for us, we’ve established a format here, and we must proceed, somehow. Down The Road is another competent album of pleasant R&B-inspired originals with some country flavors. He’s not overtly complaining about how the industry’s screwed him, but at least two songs lament the state of current popular music. “Hey Mr. DJ” is a Sam Cooke song in all but delivery, while “Whatever Happened To P.J. Proby?” gets its inspiration from a guy best known as having a hit with a Lennon-McCartney giveaway. “Choppin’ Wood” is supposedly about Van’s father, but it’s got the same rhythm as the far inferior “Talk Is Cheap”, lessening the sentiment somewhat. “All Work And No Play” spouts the usual clichés, and his ill-advised quasi-scatting results in one of the least essential versions of “Georgia On My Mind” ever recorded. Despite the pedestrian lyrics, “Evening Shadows” is an intriguing collaboration with jazz clarinet legend Acker Bilk, and we get more variations on common themes like “Meet Me In The Indian Summer” and “What Makes The Irish Heart Beat”.

At 15 tracks and over an hour of playing time, Down The Road is too long to really ingest, and the listener would likely put on an earlier album that truly resonates. In the plus column: not a sign of Brian Kennedy anywhere.

Van Morrison Down The Road (2002)—3