Beautiful Vision is the thirteenth studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison, released in February 1982.

[3] Neither Knopfler nor Herbie Armstrong were able to produce the guitar tone Morrison wanted, so engineer Jim Stern suggested Chris Michie: "I got the call when I was doing a session in San Francisco.

[12] Her book discusses the New Age ideas of "glamours" or "mental illusions", which formed a fog that covers the "spiritual warrior" and the "Aryan race" from the world.

"[5] "Cleaning Windows" is about Morrison's first full-time job and the last carefree days of his adolescence in the years 1961 to 1962, and is a metaphor for the idea that his music alters people's perceptions of life.

[8] Biographer Steve Turner believes in this song Morrison "captured the balance between his contentment at work and his aspirations to learn more about music.

It conveyed the impression that his happiness with the mundane routine of smoking Woodbine cigarettes, eating Paris buns and drinking lemonade was made possible by the promise that at the end of the day he could enter the world of books and records ...

Murphy's two other songwriting contributions to the album are "Dweller on the Threshold" and "Aryan Myst", both explicitly influenced by Alice Bailey's work "Glamour: A World Problem", which contains direct references to angels.

Beautiful Vision ends with the instrumental "Scandinavia", with Morrison on piano and prominently features Mark Isham's synthesizer.

[25] The album was not released with a lyric sheet, and many of the first vinyl pressings were cut off-center, all because of production issues that resulted in a lack of quality control and "shoddy packaging", according to Morrison biographer Brian Hinton.

"[23] Chip Stern from High Fidelity believed even the inferior songs are a pleasure to listen to because of Morrison's maturation into a more relaxed and disciplined singer, while his band is eclectic yet subtle enough to incorporate a number of styles without sounding ostentatious: "On tunes like 'Dweller on the Threshold', an r&b groove will suddenly support Celtic, Oriental, or Northern European folk references.

"[27] Rolling Stone magazine's John Milward was less enthusiastic and lamented four of the songs because of what he felt were unimaginative lyrics, instances "when he lets his brain trivialize his heart" on an album that is otherwise superior to the temporal, superficial nature of most popular music, "a cogent statement of belief that finds Morrison touching his dangerously dogmatic themes with the grace of God".

He first noted that "At its most banal, on the dragging title ballad for instance, Beautiful Vision's spiritual content is nothing more than vague mood, and it’s hard to take Morrison's clichés as God given, no matter how purely they're rendered."

"[28] At the end of 1982, Beautiful Vision was voted the 28th best album of the year in the Pazz & Jop, an annual poll of prominent critics published by The Village Voice.

[29] Billboard magazine's Sam Sutherland named it 1982's ninth best record in his own year-end list and said "Morrison's fusion of Celtic folk, American jazz and universal mysticism remains unique.

[22] Stephen Thomas Erlewine was more critical in a retrospective review for AllMusic, writing that because of the music's indistinct melodies and measured pace that threatens to dull, many of the songs are unessential for most listeners.

[19] The Guardian's Laura Barton, on the other hand, said it "never struck me as dull; on the contrary, its particular strangeness has always proved appealing – an exploration of Celtic heritage, distance, reminiscence, spirituality and the writings of Alice Bailey.

After the release of the album, Morrison performed a series of concerts at the Dominion Theatre, London, opened by Herbie Armstrong with an acoustic set.

[36] Paul Charles, who managed Morrison's business affairs at the time, commented that "The idea [behind the Dominion residencies] was [to go against the] 'come into town, do one show, get all the press down, get the radio and TV and record-company people' [mentally].

"[37] Morrison's love of live performing was reignited by this set of concerts and he commented at the time that it was "more like appearing in a play, going to the theatre and doing your job every day – which I prefer to touring because that's very fragmented and disorientating.

[9] All the songs of the album have been performed live, some of them many hundred times, whereas "Across the bridge where angels dwell" and "Scandinavia" were only played on very few concerts.

[36] On 27 January 1984, Morrison performed at another Rockpalast TV special from the Midem at Cannes, where he promoted Inarticulate Speech of the Heart and included seven songs from Beautiful Vision.