Hymns to the Silence: Inside the Words and Music of Van Morrison

The first in-depth study of Van Morrison's musical genius

"Music is spiritual, the music business isn't"--Van Morrison, 1991

Peter Mills' groundbreaking new book Hymns to the Silence is a detailed look at Morrison as a singer, performer, lyricist, musician, and writer. Particular attention is paid throughout the work to the contradictions and tensions that are central to any understanding of his work as a whole. Van Morrison has a global profile due to his enduring popularity and his dedication to live performance, which keeps him before audiences all over the world, and this is the first in-depth study of Van Morrison's musical genius, going back 40 years, investigating the oppositions and harmonies within his work.

Presenting a prismatic approach to Van Morrison's entire oeuvre, Mills engages with his subject in a manner which is fresh, challenging to received wisdom, and accessible in style. He explores the thematic tensions that characterize Morrison's work, examines his ideas about music and spirituality, and the relationship between the two. Mills also considers him in the context of the broader schema of the music industry as a "difficult" but high-yielding earner. As a writer and lyricist, specifically as an Irish writer, Morrison has recorded musical settings of Yeats poems, collaborated with Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan and Gerald Dawe, and who regularly drops quotes from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett into his live performances. It also looks at him as a singer and at how he uses his voice as an interpretive instrument. Other chapters in the book focus on his use of mythology, on his stage performances, and on his continuing fascination with America and its musical forms.

Hymns to the Silence is a thoroughly informed and enlightened study of the art of a pop music maverick that will delight fans the world over.