Van Morrison is one of the most revered singers and songwriters of the post-war pop music era, which means there’s no shortage of singers eager to collaborate with him. But according to some of those close to the mercurial Irish musician, there are relatively few he’s been longing to work with.
That number increased with Monday’s release of Morrison’s new album, Duets: Re-Working the Catalogue. Among his 16 duet partners: Mavis Staples, Taj Mahal, Michael Buble, Natalie Cole, the late Bobby Womack and Morrison’s daughter, Shana Morrison.
“Since I was a kid,” Buble told The Times by phone from Argentina, “no one in the modern world has inspired me more” than Morrison. Saying he’s rarely given a concert that hasn’t included at least one of Morrison’s songs, Buble added: “That was my dream duet. I would have taken him over Sinatra, for sure.”
For Morrison, “There were two parts to it,” the 69-year-old artist said. “One was the fun of doing duets. The other was reworking the songs, as no one else is working them. ... It’s not like the old days, where you had a publisher that was going to work your songs. So that was the other strand of the duets.”
Morrison has spent the vast majority of his career looking ahead, writing and recording a string of studio albums that now numbers more than three dozen; Duets: Re-Working the Catalogue represents a rare dip into his past.
The new album, he said, “has been in the works for a long time ... it just seemed the right time to do it when the Blues Fest was going on in London in 2013.” During that event, Morrison invited Staples, Womack and Cole to go into a recording studio to get the ball rolling. He’s been chipping away at it ever since.
Last year, blues musician Mahal had just finished a European tour and stopped in Northern Ireland to record How Can a Poor Boy with Morrison, whom Mahal said he has long admired.
“I first heard him in the 60s at a show with Aretha Franklin and Dr John and I thought then, ‘Who is this guy?’” Mahal said at a performance Morrison gave last summer outside his hometown of Belfast. “Even then, you knew he’s no copyist. There’s a lot of people he likes, but there’s nobody like him.”
The distinctive blend of musical styles in Morrison’s music was cited by several of the album’s duet participants as the reason they jumped at the invitation to join him.
No box big enough
“What I love about Van so much was that you couldn’t categorise him,” said Buble, who sings one of his favourite Morrison songs, Real Real Gone, on the album. “He’s created this wonderful mix of rock and jazz and blues and folk and Irish folk — for me it became kind of a standard I want to reach.”
Morrison’s storied back catalogue, which stretches back to his recordings with the Irish rock band Them in 1965, encompasses hundreds of songs that he and his duet partners drew from for the new album. To a large extent the songs avoid cornerstone numbers from Morrison’s repertoire, focusing more on deep cuts from albums that nearly span his career.
“Some [artists] chose their own songs and I had specific tracks in mind for others,” he said.
“[For] Bobby Womack, I sent him that track,” referring to Some Peace of Mind, a track from Morrison’s 1991 album Hymns to the Silence. “Other ones had songs in mind, like Mick Hucknall wanted to do Streets of Arklow, he specifically picked that song and Mark Knopfler, Michael Buble and Natalie Cole picked their songs.
“Of course the PJ Proby one is pretty obvious,” Morrison said. “I had recorded that song (Whatever Happened to PJ Proby) sometime in the early 2000s, so that was an easy one.”
The album is produced by Morrison with Don Was and Bob Rock. Was is known for a string of high-profile producer credits with the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop and Kris Kristofferson, among numerous others.
“He doesn’t really need a producer,” said Was, who as president of Blue Note Records also released Morrison’s 2012 studio album, Born to Sing — No Plan B. “I just helped with some of the guest vocals.
Picking the right note
“To be honest, I think he has so much respect for these artists who joined him, I just felt he didn’t want to be perceived as bossing them around,” Was said. “Like it would be disrespectful for him to tell them how to sing. That’s really all I did.”
Most of the tracks were done with the singers together in the studio, though for a couple — including These Are the Days with Cole — scheduling required Morrison to lay down the basic track and his vocal, with his collaborator adding her or his part later.
Cole said she’d never met Morrison before, although when they got together, he expressed his affection for the music of her father, Nat King Cole, and made a point of telling her that he’d long followed her career as well.
“He’s always had such an unusual approach to his music — it’s very soulful, and I’ve always gravitated toward that,” Cole said. As for singing with a musically idiosyncratic singer like Morrison, she said “it was just a matter of getting into his psyche and figuring out where he was going with his vocal.
“His vocals were so laid back, a little on the lazy side, that what I wanted to bring to it was an undertone of elegance — a coolness to it to complement what he was doing, and he loved that,” she said. “I just wanted to fit in with him.”
