Education Quote by Van Morrison

For Van Morrison, Louis Armstrong isn’t just a jazz hero; he’s a permission slip. “You never sang a song the same way twice” reads like a technical observation, but it’s really a manifesto against the museum version of music where “the definitive take” becomes a life sentence. Morrison is pointing to what early recordings captured almost by accident: the feeling of a live room, a performer thinking in real time, a voice treating melody as something to argue with, not obey.

The line also smuggles in a philosophy of identity. If the song can’t be repeated, neither can the self who sings it. Morrison’s own catalog is built on that tension: familiar forms (blues changes, doo-wop cadences, Celtic lilt) repeatedly broken open by phrasing that rushes, drags, chews syllables, or leaps ahead of the barline. He’s honoring Armstrong’s most radical lesson: interpretation is composition. The “song” is only a scaffold; meaning happens in the variations, the micro-decisions, the crack in the voice.

Context matters, too. Early recording technology was limited, takes were precious, and that scarcity sharpened invention. Armstrong turned constraint into spontaneity, leaving performances that sound less like documentation than discovery. Morrison, coming of age amid pop’s increasing polish and repetition, frames Armstrong as an antidote: authenticity not as sincerity, but as risk. The subtext is a challenge to every singer who wants safety: if you can repeat it perfectly, you probably didn’t go far enough.