Composition
The songs on this album recall various stages of Morrison's life. "Kingdom Hall" reflected back to his childhood in Belfast when he attended services with his mother, a practicing Jehovah's Witness at one time. "Checking It Out" is about a relationship going wrong and being rescued by "guides and spirits along the way". "Natalia", "Venice USA" and "Lifetimes" are love songs. "Wavelength" recalled fond memories of his adolescence, listening to the Voice of America. The next track incorporates two songs Morrison had written in the early 1970s, "Santa Fe" written with Jackie DeShannon in 1973, Morrison's first ever collaboration to appear on an album and "Beautiful Obsession", which was first played during one of his concerts in 1971. However, a studio version of the song is not known to have been recorded during that period. "Hungry For Your Love" appeared in the hit movie An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) and has become one of the more enduringly popular songs on the album along with "Wavelength". Morrison plays electric piano on "Hungry For Your Love" accompanied by Herbie Armstrong's acoustic guitar. Morrison included "Hungry For Your Love" on his compilation album Van Morrison at the Movies - Soundtrack Hits (2007). "Take it Where You Find It" ends the album and according to Scott Floman is a "quietly epic love letter to America that gets better and better as it goes along (the song is nearly 9 minutes long). Simply put this song, which I'd rank among Van's all-time best, makes me want to lock arms with someone, anyone, and commence in a slowly swaying sing along..."
Read more about this topic: Wavelength (album)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“There is singularly nothing that makes a difference a difference in beginning and in the middle and in ending except that each generation has something different at which they are all looking. By this I mean so simply that anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opinions. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.”
—Derek Gjertsen, British scientist, author. Science and Philosophy: Past and Present, ch. 3, Penguin (1989)
“I live in the angle of a leaden wall, into whose composition was poured a little alloy of bell-metal. Often, in the repose of my mid-day, there reaches my ears a confused tintinnabulum from without. It is the noise of my contemporaries.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)