Everything I said about the previous album holds true here. Like that album, the vocals were too loud in relation to the instruments for nearly all the songs, so I edited them to bring them more into balance. As with that album, I could only do so much, but I think these versions sound better than the popular bootlegs the songs come from, such as "Gypsy Soul" and "Van Morrison Gets His Chance to Wail."
Six of the first seven songs were recorded on or around December 1969, after the songs for the classic "Moodance" album were recorded, but before that album was released (in February 1970). So most of the songs were geared towards his next album, "His Band and Street Choir." I also included a fast version of the song "Come Running" that was recorded for "Moondance" in the summer of 1969. I put that on this album instead of the previous one because that has a different version of the same song. The rest of the songs were recorded in 1970 and also were meant for the "His Band and Street Choir," though one song, "When That Evening Sun Goes Down" would appear on the album after that instead, "Tupelo Honey."
I'm only including songs that don't appear on any studio albums from that era. However, I can include four unreleased songs - "I Can't Get It Straight," "Lorna," "Hey Where Are You," and "Bit by Bit" because I had two versions of those, so I was able to put one version on my series of stray tracks albums and the second version here. As I mentioned previously, Morrison wrote more good songs than he knew what to do with in 1968 and 1969, and some of them fell through the cracks and were forgotten, such as those four.
By the way, there was a sonic flaw towards the end of "If I Ever Needed Someone," a kind of crackling sound. I was able to remove most of it by patching in some repeated lyrics from earlier in the song, but a little bit of it wasn't fixable at the end of the last verse, due to lyrics that didn't get repeated.
Also, I did a lot of editing for the tenth track here, which is some dialogue between Morrison and presumably his record producer. On the bootleg I got this from, the vocals were so low as to be almost inaudible, so I moved them to a separate track and increased the volume a lot. It turns out the producer's vocals were much quieter than Morrison's probably because Morrison was right in front of a microphone and the producer wasn't. So I increased the producer's vocals even more. That worked, but the result was a lot of hiss, especially when the producer talked. To fix that, I used noise reduction. Normally, I'm loathe to use that since it degrades the music quality overall, but I think it was okay to use here, since it was done merely for talking and not actual music.
I wish I could continue this acoustic series into 1971 and beyond, but there's no more publicly available relevant source material after this. However, Morrison did play acoustically in concert later in the 1970s (though very rarely), and I plan on posting some of that here soon.
01 Virgo Clowns (Van Morrison)
02 Come Running [Fast Version] (Van Morrison)
03 If I Ever Needed Someone (Van Morrison)
04 I Can't Get It Straight (Van Morrison)
05 Lorna (Van Morrison)
06 Hey, Where Are You (Van Morrison)
07 Bit by Bit (Van Morrison)
08 Domino [Harmony Version] (Van Morrison)
09 When the Evening Sun Goes Down (Van Morrison)
10 talk (Van Morrison)
11 Domino (Van Morrison)
12 I'll Be Your Lover Too (Van Morrison)
https://www.imagenetz.de/jYuvC
The photo for the cover art was taken in Woodstock, New York, in April 1970. As I did with the photo for the other Van Morrison acoustic album I just posted, I tinted the black and white photo with a blend of colors to try to jazz it up.
Thanks.
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