Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

Van Morrison’s line feels like a defensive shrug aimed at a culture that’s learned to sneer at looking back. In pop discourse, nostalgia often gets filed under soft weakness: escapism, denial, a refusal to do the work of living in the present. Morrison pushes against that moralizing reflex. Not with a manifesto, but with a casual “I don’t think,” the kind of phrasing that signals intuition rather than ideology. He’s not arguing nostalgia is always good; he’s arguing it’s not automatically suspect.

The subtext is autobiographical. Morrison’s music has long treated memory as a solvent: it dissolves the boundary between time periods and lets the past leak into the present as sensation. “Brown Eyed Girl,” “Cyprus Avenue,” “Into the Mystic” aren’t history lessons; they’re mood machines, built from fragments of youth, place, and longing. For an artist like that, nostalgia isn’t a retro trend or a brand strategy. It’s a songwriting engine, the emotional raw material that turns private recollection into shared atmosphere.

Context matters because “nostalgia” has become a political and commercial buzzword: a tool for selling reboots and for pitching national myths. Morrison’s insistence on nostalgia’s neutrality is a bid to rescue it from both cynicism and exploitation. He’s claiming the right to remember without being accused of retreat. Sometimes looking back is avoidance; sometimes it’s continuity. Sometimes it’s grief with better lighting. Morrison’s point is that the feeling itself isn’t the enemy - what you do with it is.