Beautiful Vision

"Hey Jimmy, I want to go home! Hey Jimmy, I been away too long…"

And you feel like shouting yeah to the way he sings it, to the way the voice reaches into your soul like only the most expressive instrument can, like Muddy Waters' slide, or Charlie Parker's sax, or Mavis Staples' voice… but you know what he's talking about as well.

And that's the only way you can face into a new Van Morrison album – you have to know… no, feel the complex relationship between the man's singing, with its extraordinary saxophonic phrasing, and his song, with its affluence of mystical and impressionistic imagery, the one complementing the other in a series of soulful bounding leaps, each album completing a series of circles within itself and its ideas. A music of spheres, even.

And maybe, if you don't come from Belfast, or Glasgow, you won't exactly get the significance of "Hey Jimmy, I want to go home"… but as a half-humorous aside in 'Celtic Ray', it works perfectly, not just in letting The Voice rise up righteous, but in rounding out an emigrant's view of his homeland, and how it calls him back with the images, the mysteries, the voices of childhood.

Yet it's what sent you out to roam, as he explores, in the second track, 'Northern Muse', a song of love to the impulse to music and poetry that touched him in youth and sent him far away "from the County Down". The muse that moved him on the solid ground… maybe to his soul, like jelly roll.

Sean Fulsom's piping on both tracks is not stylistically the most traditional, but it fits the songs to create the texture of which Morrison and his lyrics move.

'Cleaning Windows', the opening track of side two, is similarly retrospective, but a funky, chuckling, joyous sound, as Morrison recalls working with Sam, cleaning windows during the week and blowing sax in a band at weekends – and a brass break swings it, hot as chilli. Remembering, Paris buns, five Woodbines, the sights, the sounds, he conjures up a warm-hearted picture of the apprentice musician's life in Belfast in the early '60s, hearing Blind Lemon and Leadbelly on the streets, and listening to Jimmy Rodgers at lunchtime.

And just for the crack, to tease you like, he throws in a bit of the old shadow doubletracking that Jimmy Rodgers and John Lee Hooker used to use.

Several of the other songs on the album draw inspiration from Glamour – A World Problem by Alice Bailey – 'Arya Mist', and what sounds like a self-portrait, 'Dweller On A Threshold'.

The album, like all Morrison's work, ultimately comes down to a series of self-expressions and revelations. 'Beautiful Vision' is devotional rather than religious, soulful rather than theological, spiritual rather than literal, into the mystic via the muse.

Beautiful Vision shares with 'Common One' a sense of release and peace, and while it's more up and bouncy than Common One, it shares it deep understatement. This album is not going to jump out of a dark alley to breathe cheap poison and vulgar shock all over you. You're going to have to meet it on its own terms.

In an era which has elevated the next big thing to an art form, surrendered up to half the world's stages to musician who can't play and half the world's dancefloors to people who can't dance, Van Morrison may well seem an anachronism – but if so, it's the era's loss, not his.

Common One is a record which repaid constant replay to emerge as a timeless and epic collection, just as I've no doubt Beautiful Vision will – yet it was downplayed and dismissed in many quarters.

The demand was made, in effect, that Morrison be relevant, and not on his own terms, but on the terms of a scene and a society that he has by now little in common with. What too many "critics" seem unable to realise is that music can aspire to the infinity of the heart and soul, the top and bottom lines of emotion, the righteous expression of what we feel… the timelessness.

And to a quality that is timeless.

Is this an utterly traditional view? That some music can simply be good, irrespective of time and place? Isn't that what stands Tim Buckley alongside the Swan Silvertones?

There is also the fact that craftsmen and artists develop almost imperceptibly once they arrive at a certain point. Like, the piping of Seamus Ennis has not materially changed in the last generation – he achieved greatness long ago.

And no, I'm not suggesting Morrison has thought too much about all this – at a guess he's one step beyond that, on the edge of spheres where you just do it, the best you an, and it's right or not. And that's it. Where thought is just an adjunct of instinct, and reason runs a poor second to soul.

Just listen to 'Vaulose Stairway' if you want to talk about soul. It makes me righteous, it'll make you whole.

The ball is in your court now, dear reader – Beautiful Vision is a record that will repay your attention. You just need to listen when your heart is open.