Van Morrison – Keep It Simple

Van Morrison is the kind of superlative singer who justifies the cliche about the artist who “could sing the phone book.” The songs on Keep It Simple are certainly better than names and numbers, though none of them rank with Morrison’s best. To be fair, competing with one’s finest work is a Herculean challenge for an artist who has made records for over four decades and just recently repackaged his past into multiple volumes of “hits.”

Blues shuffles and country ballads are the templates for much of Keep It Simple. A beefy organ riffles through the bluesy songs, such as “How Can A Poor Boy”, while pedal steel surfaces on the country-styled tunes. Background singers who turn occasionally schmaltzy are applied liberally, and familiar lyrical phrases abound. “Don’t get around much anymore,” admits Morrison on “Don’t Go To Nightclubs Anymore”, while on “School Of Hard Knocks”, the singer is left “high and dry.” Morrison as much as admits that the verse melody of “Love Come Back” owes a debt to Hanks Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”, but instead of the moon, his song finds the “sun behind the clouds.”

“Song Of Home” is a sweet country waltz that transcends its familiar allusion to “harbor lights,” but on “Soul”, Morrison’s blue-note exhortations best explain what he otherwise expresses in mundanely literal words. On “Behind The Ritual”, a meditative seven-minute groove that closes the collection, Morrison chants of “drinking that wine” and later sings a verse of, literally, “blah blah blah.” Blame it on the pleasurable perspective of being a Morrison fan for decades, but that just doesn’t seem as poetic as the “nah nah nah” calls of “Caravan”.