Walsh is at Brookline Booksmith celebrating the book’s release with a discussion with Carly Carioli, the former Boston Magazine editor who assigned the original article that inspired Walsh’s endeavor. Walsh (no relation) has officially declared today (March 6) as “Astral Weeks Day” in the city, and tonight, Ryan H.

It’s a complicated web, knit with the legacies of hundreds of people over numerous decades - and somehow, heroically, it all comes together in Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, a fascinating and exhaustively researched new book by local author and musician Ryan H. If 1968 would live in infamy as a flexpoint for world culture, it was also a time when Boston’s artistic community was unconsciously getting in touch with its ancient traditions of transcendence and communalism. In 1968, an Irish pop singer named Van Morrison followed up the success of his 1967 quasi-hit single “Brown Eyed Girl” with a strange and emotionally raw record called Astral Weeks its release heralded a new emotional honesty in popular music, as its mesmeric musings laid bare Morrison’s stoned awe at the wonder of life, love, and the universe.Īs it so happens, the genesis of the album, the point when Van Morrison cracked open his cosmic skull, was during a half-year period when he was living with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts the songs and the record are an interwoven byproduct of connections Morrison made deep within the denizens of Boston’s thriving musical community. It all boils down to the alchemy of true change: To become something else requires risk of the unknown, a leap into the void, hoping to be born again on the other side of transformation. One can never really know if one is living through an extraordinary time likewise, the moments when lasting works of influential art are created seldom seem of consequence until after the moment has passed.

Van morrison astral weeks books