Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

There is a stubborn kind of romance in Van Morrison’s refusal to chase the “contemporary” or the “commercial,” but it’s not the soft-focus version the music industry likes to sell. It’s a line that doubles as self-defense. By dismissing the market’s categories as meaningless, Morrison frames his work as something closer to craft or calling than product - a move that protects both the artist’s mystique and the listener’s faith that the songs came from someplace real.

The subtext is a quiet accusation: that “contemporary” is often just another word for trend-chasing, and “commercial” for compromise. Morrison has always thrived in the spaces where genres blur - Belfast R&B, jazz phrasing, Celtic folk, gospel shout, stream-of-consciousness poetry. His catalog, from the astral searching of Astral Weeks to the ecstatic repetition of Moondance-era grooves and beyond, reads like a man building an inner weather system, not a brand strategy.

Context matters because Morrison’s career has run alongside decades when radio formats tightened, labels demanded hooks, and “relevance” became a quarterly metric. He’s also had his share of prickliness and public controversy, which makes the statement feel less like a humble manifesto than an assertion of sovereignty: you don’t get to grade me with your rubric.

It works because it’s both defiant and strategically vague. “It didn’t mean anything to me” is not an argument; it’s a boundary. The listener is invited to hear the music as insulated from commerce, even as it inevitably circulates through it.