When Van Morrison sings, "I believe I've transcended," at the end of "Astral Weeks" — the first song in this full 2008 recital of his historic album of the same name — it is in a warm, grateful growl remarkably like that of the younger man who made the 1968 studio LP. Astral Weeks was Morrison's first step toward transcendence as a singer-songwriter, a radical turn away from the AM-radio success of his 1967 hit "Brown Eyed Girl." The album is still like nothing else in rock, a quiet union of breathtaking opposites: Morrison's soul-trance reflections on his early life in Belfast and the tension of the chamber-jazz arrangements.

The ruminative force of Morrison's singing on Weeks was not that far from his early hard-blues attack in the band Them. In the live Astral Weeks, performed with a big band that reproduces the gentle touch of the '68 session group, Morrison brings out those blues more emphatically — his vocal-and-harp break in "Sweet Thing" is like a hot wind of Little Walter. Morrison has also re-sequenced the album for concert effect, ending with the extended hypnosis of "Madame George." The 1968 LP closes with the weightless "Slim Slow Slider" — just acoustic bass and splashes of tone around Morrison's heated whisper. Here the song slips into a John Lee Hooker-like groove, and while I prefer the original, the change is an uplifting surprise. Transcendence is always a work in progress; the eight songs on Astral Weeks are still up to the task.

“Oh Sherrie”

Steve Perry's girlfriend Sherrie Swafford was actually in the studio when Perry began writing this song--his lone Top Ten hit as a solo act--with two co-writers. The trio began at midnight one night with just "Oh, Sherrie!" and "hold on, hold on." Three hours later, they had a complete song. Swafford, however, had to wait until the next day to hear it. "Sherrie actually got tired and went to bed," Perry said. She also appeared in the video, but their relationship did not hold on for long.