Songinfo
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Into the Mystic" is a song written by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison and featured on his 1970 album Moondance. It was also included on Morrison's 1974 live album, It's Too Late To Stop Now. Into the Mystic" was recorded during the Moondance sessions at A&R Recording Studios in New York City in September to November 1969. The lyrics are about a spiritual quest, typical of Morrison's work. "Bass thrums like a boat in motion, and the song comes back to water as a means of magical transformation. At the very end Van sings: too late to stop now, suggesting that the song also describes an act of love." (This phrase would become a key point of many live concerts.) Compared to "Yesterday" by The Beatles, it has been described as "another song where the music and the words seem to have been born together, at the same time, to make one perfectly formed, complete artistic element.“
Morrison remarked on the song and how its use of homophones lent it alternate meanings:
"'Into the Mystic' is another one like 'Madame Joy' and 'Brown Eyed Girl'. Originally I wrote it as 'Into the Misty'. But later I thought that it had something of an ethereal feeling to it so I called it 'Into the Mystic'. That song is kind of funny because when it came time to send the lyrics in WB Music, I couldn't figure out what to send them. Because really the song has two sets of lyrics. For example, there's 'I was born before the wind' and 'I was borne before the wind', and also 'Also younger than the son, Ere the bonny boat was one' and 'All so younger than the son, Ere the bonny boat was won' ... I guess the song is just about being part of the universe."
Bruce on the artist
2011-03-00 Renegade Nation Studio, New York City
Bruce makes his debut appearance on Steven Van Zandt's Little Steven's Underground Garage radio show. The interview was broadcast in three parts on April 1, 8 and 15 on over 200 terrestrial FM radio stations
across the United States. They discuss Them, and how Bruce (with The Castiles) performed their show-stopper "Mystic Eyes" at a Battle Of The Bands contest in 1966.
Springsteen was a huge fan of Van Morrison's old garage band Them (best known for "Gloria") in the 1960s, but it wasn't until he saw Morrison in concert sometime around 1971 that he truly understood the man's genius. He found the combination of organ and horns intoxicating, and the influence on his first two albums is unmistakable. If you don't believe that, listen to Morrison's "Domino" and Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)" back to back. Van's 1968 masterpiece Astral Weeks became a particular obsession. "It was like a religion to us," Steve Van Zandt said in 2005. They even brought Morrison's bass player Richard Davis into the studio to play on Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., and Born to Run.
desert island songs :Van Morrison - Madame George (1968) : The previous tracks helped to lay down the foundations of the figure who would become Bruce Springsteen - the rocker. But once he’d started on his artistic journey, other influences began to emerge:
“Astral Weeks was an extremely important record for me. It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine. The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again. But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. There’d be no New York City Serenade if there hadn’t been Astral Weeks.”