[4][5] Morrison began performing as a teenager in the late 1950s, playing a variety of instruments including guitar, harmonica, keyboards and saxophone for various Irish showbands, covering the popular hits of that time.

An equal part of his catalogue consists of lengthy, spiritually inspired musical journeys that show the influence of Celtic tradition, jazz and stream of consciousness narrative, of which Astral Weeks is a prime example.

[24][25] Morrison's father bought him his first acoustic guitar when he was 11, and he learned to play rudimentary chords from the song book The Carter Family Style, edited by Alan Lomax.

[42][43][44] The roots of Them, the band that first broke Morrison on the international scene, came in April 1964 when he responded to an advert for musicians to play at a new R&B club at the Maritime Hotel in College Square North – an old Belfast hostel frequented by sailors.

Brian Hinton relates how "Jim Morrison learned quickly from his near namesake's stagecraft, his apparent recklessness, his air of subdued menace, the way he would improvise poetry to a rock beat, even his habit of crouching down by the bass drum during instrumental breaks.

[94][95][96] A 2004 Rolling Stone magazine review begins with the words: "This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description.

Whereas Astral Weeks had a sorrowful and vulnerable tone, Moondance restored a more optimistic and cheerful message to his music,[105] which abandoned the previous record's abstract folk compositions in favour of more formally composed songs and a lively rhythm and blues style he expanded on throughout his career.

Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus had a combined full-page review in Rolling Stone, saying Morrison now had "the striking imagination of a consciousness that is visionary in the strongest sense of the word.

"[120] Released in 1972, Saint Dominic's Preview revealed Morrison's break from the more accessible style of his previous three albums and moving back towards the more daring, adventurous, and meditative aspects of Astral Weeks.

[135] The opening track, "Kingdom Hall"—the name given by Jehovah's Witnesses to their places of worship—evoked Morrison's childhood experiences of religion with his mother,[134] and foretold the religious themes that were more evident on his next album, Into the Music.

NME magazine's Paul Du Noyer called the album "colossally smug and cosmically dull; an interminable, vacuous and drearily egotistical stab at spirituality: Into the muzak.

[143] Lester Bangs wrote in 1982, "Van was making holy music even though he thought he was, and us rock critics had made our usual mistake of paying too much attention to the lyrics.

[145] Several other songs on the album, "Vanlose Stairway", "She Gives Me Religion", and the instrumental, "Scandinavia" show the presence of a new personal muse in his life: a Danish public relations agent, who would share Morrison's spiritual interests and serve as a steadying influence on him throughout most of the 1980s.

Although considered to be a deeply spiritual album,[163] it also contained "Daring Night", which "deals with full, blazing sex, whatever its churchy organ and gentle lilt suggest"(Hinton).

[166][167] The early to middle 1990s were commercially successful for Morrison with three albums reaching the top five of the UK charts, sold-out concerts, and a more visible public profile; but this period also marked a decline in the critical reception to his work.

[205] Morrison's 70th birthday in 2015 was marked by celebrations in his hometown of Belfast, commencing with BBC Radio Ulster presenting programs including "Top 70 Van Tracks" between 26 and 28 August.

[252] Morrison performed before an estimated audience of sixty to eighty thousand people when US President Bill Clinton visited Belfast, Northern Ireland on 30 November 1995.

In June 2021, The Times noted that "fittingly for someone who has been so vocally opposed to the lockdown" resulting from the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic, "Van Morrison played one of the first big-scale concerts in London since events, albeit tentatively, started up again."

[281] He has worked with many legends in soul and blues, including John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, George Benson, Eric Clapton, Bobby Womack, and BB King, along with The Chieftains, Gregory Porter, Michael Bublé, Joss Stone, Natalie Cole and Mark Knopfler.

He reunited with The Chieftains on their 1995 album, The Long Black Veil, with a reworking of Morrison's song "Have I Told You Lately" winning the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals.

Morrison delivered vocals on "The Last Laugh" on Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia (2000), and that year also recorded a classic country music duet album, You Win Again with Linda Gail Lewis.

[293] It is at the heart of Morrison's presence as a singer that when he lights on certain sounds, certain small moments inside a song—hesitations, silences, shifts in pressure, sudden entrances, slamming doors—can then suggest whole territories, completed stories, indistinct ceremonies, far outside anything that can be literally traced in the compositions that carry them.

"[302] Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture.

Scott Foundas with LA Weekly wrote "he seeks to transcend the apparent boundaries of any given song; to achieve a total freedom of form; to take himself, his band and the audience on a journey whose destination is anything but known.

Echoes of Morrison's rugged literateness and his gruff, feverish emotive vocals can be heard in latter day icons ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Elvis Costello".

I had to stop listening to Van Morrison records about six months before we made The Unforgettable Fire because I didn't want his very original soul voice to overpower my own".

[171] Although he often expresses his displeasure (in interviews and songs) with the music industry and the media in general, he has been instrumental in promoting the careers of many other musicians and singers, such as James Hunter,[351] and fellow Belfast-born brothers Brian and Bap Kennedy.

[352][353] He has also influenced the visual arts: the German painter Johannes Heisig created a series of lithographs illustrating the book In the Garden – for Van Morrison, published by Städtische Galerie Sonneberg, Germany, in 1997.

Glen Hansard of the Irish rock band the Frames (who lists Van Morrison as being part of his holy trinity with Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen) commonly covers his songs in concert.

Facing deportation due to visa problems, he managed to stay in the US when his American girlfriend Janet (Planet) Rigsbee, who had a son named Peter from a previous relationship,[408] agreed to marry him.