Listening to Van Morrison - Softcover

'A grateful and passionate celebration of what it means to hear his music ... a compelling appreciation of one of history's most remarkable, undefinable musicians.' --Guardian

'Marcus's approach yields fresh insight into one of pop's most complex personas.' San Francisco Chronicle
'Beautifully written.' Portland Oregonian
'[Marcus is] literate, brainy and fearless in making cross-genre comparisons.' Portland Mercury
'One of the most interesting rock scribes of the past quarter-century.' --Washington City Paper

'No critical testimonial is more welcome than this assessment of Morrison's work by one of America's most astute cultural critics.... Marcus is informed and insightful. Particularly illuminating are his observations on the tensions between Morrison's roles as singer and songwriter, and on Morrison's ongoing 'quest for the yarragh' --Booklist

'This is a journey worth taking, an exploration of the Irishness central to the most perplexing individual who ever came off that island with suitcase and guitar in hand ... You will search for a long time before you read a more enthralling and original interpretation of 'Madame George', Morrison's grand lament on Astral Weeks. Over 16 pages he dissects this incredible song with the care of a lover and skill of a surgeon.' -- Kevin Mitchell, Observer

'Writing about the songs of Van Morrison is rightly seen as something of a paradox. Perhaps that's because, for all his scholarly use of multiple musical styles and his references to Yeats and Joyce, the Belfast Cowboy's work is more sensual than it is intellectual. Which makes the renowned rock critic Greil Marcus, who's written definitively on Elvis and Bob Dylan, the right man to plumb that work. Combining an incantatory prose style with careful reporting and inventive, sometimes infuriating judgments, Marcus manages to illuminate Morrison's cerebral soul music - even if, as the singer once claimed, 'the process is beyond words' ... Still, that's what the most thoughtful music critics make you do: argue like crazy about their choices and ideas. And it's what Marcus does here - reminding us, even as he antagonizes us, why we listen to Morrison in the first place.' --New York Times

'There's a fascinating 20-page essay on Astral Weeks, an album much written about but rarely as perceptively or as thoughtfully as here ... [This book] is clearly the product of many, many years of listening and thinking and of a deep love of the music. It's also wondrously bold and ambitious.' --Marcus Berkman, Spectator

Greil Marcus is the author of Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, Lipstick Traces, and Double Trouble, and the editor of Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. In 1998 he curated the exhibition '1948' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He was described by John Rockwell in the New York Times as 'a writer of rare perception and a genuinely innovative thinker'. Greil Marcus lives in California.