Composition
The songs on the album lean towards the blues the singer listened to in his youth. The title track was originally entitled "Down the Road I Go" and was first recorded in 1981 with guitarist Mark Knopfler. The song was then re-recorded with Linda Gail Lewis in November 2000 with additional lyrics. "Choppin' Wood" is a tribute to the singer's father, George Morrison, who had died suddenly from a heart attack more than a decade earlier. In "The Beauty of the Days Gone By", Morrison attempts to come to terms with approaching old age. In the song "Whatever Happened to P.J. Proby?" Morrison refers to musicians P J Proby and Scott Walker and makes political references to Screaming Lord Sutch, the former leader of the British Monster Raving Loony Party, who died in 1999. In the second verse of the song Morrison claims that he
Don't have no frame of reference no more
Not even Screaming Lord Sutch
Without him now there's no Raving Loony Party
Nowadays I guess there's not much
Read more about this topic: Down The Road (Van Morrison Album)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)