carefree days of his childhood in Belfast. Some of his song titles derive from familiar locations in his childhood such as: “Cyprus Avenue” (a nearby street), “Orangefield” (the boys school he attended), “On Hyndford Street” (where he was born). Also frequently present in Morrison’s best love songs is a blending of the sacred-profane as evidenced in “Into the Mystic” and “So Quiet in Here”. Beginning with his 1979 album, Into the Music and the song “And the Healing Has Begun”, a frequent theme of his music and lyrics has been based on his belief in the healing power of music combined with a form of mystic Christianity. This theme has become one of the predominant qualities of his work. His lyrics show an influence of the visionary poets William Blake and W. B. Yeats and others such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Biographer Brian Hinton believes “like any great poet from Blake to Seamus Heaney he takes words back to their origins in magic…Indeed, Morrison is returning poetry to its earliest roots as in Homer or Old English epics like Beowulf or the Psalms or folk song in all of which words and music combine to form a new reality.” Another biographer John Collis believes that Morrison’s style of jazz singing and repeating phrases preclude his lyrics from being regarded as poetry or as Collis asserts: “he is more likely to repeat a phrase like a mantra, or burst into scat singing. The words may often be prosaic, and so can hardly be poetry.” Morrison has described his songwriting method by remarking that: “I write from a different place. I do not even know what it is called or if it has a name. It just comes and I sculpt it, but it is also a lot of hard work doing the sculpting.” Performance style
“Van Morrison is interested,
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