Much of this is down to this record's remarkable ability to prompt an overwhelming emotional response – the album's producer, Lewis Merenstein, has described how, upon hearing the title track, he began crying. It baffled many upon its release, listeners thrown by its strange rhythms and peculiar lyrics, but over the following decades it would acquire towering cult status. "Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment's knowledge of the miracle of life."
It was Lester Bangs who put it best: "Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralysed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend," he wrote. It was one of those albums that seemed to be about everything and nothing, the past and the now, the vital and the fleeting, and that somehow stood quite complete in its vision. We find the bewitching Madame George, the ecstatic Sweet Thing, the great knee-deep tangle of reminiscence that made up Cyprus Avenue.
And so we find memories of viaducts and slipstreams, ferry boats and cadillacs and cherry wine, mingling with talk of Huddie Ledbetter and little red shoes. Morrison himself described Astral Weeks as an opera of sorts, a story with definite characters, a song-cycle of "poetry and mythical musings channelled from my imagination". It marries folk and rock and blues and jazz and gospel, flute, harpsichord, vibraphone – to create these eight songs that don't so much play as wrap themselves around your legs, that get stuck beneath your fingernails. This is an album heavy with yearning, with an aching for the streets of Belfast, for the "gardens all misty and wet with rain", for being "conquered in a car seat".
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