Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

There is a tell in the way Van Morrison repeats the verb understood: not “I liked jazz” or “I played it,” but “I understood how it worked.” He’s claiming fluency in a system, not just affection for a sound. Jazz here becomes a blueprint: an engine of timing, tension, release; a logic of call-and-response; the tightrope walk between structure and risk. For a musician often framed as instinctive, even mystic, the line quietly insists on craft. The magic is engineered.

The second sentence swings the boast wider: “That’s what I apply to everything.” It’s not just about genre. It’s a philosophy of making art in public: learn the internal mechanics, then move freely inside them. Morrison’s career has always lived in that friction. He’s a meticulous arranger who also wants the performance to feel like it’s happening for the first time. He’s a songwriter whose best work borrows jazz’s sense of propulsion while resisting jazz’s social mythology of cool detachment; his music tends to sweat, plead, testify.

There’s subtext, too, about authority. Morrison has long resisted being managed by narratives - critics, industry, fans. Saying he “understood how it worked” is a way of reclaiming control: don’t reduce me to vibes, I know the wiring. And by exporting that understanding “to everything,” he’s sketching an artist’s survival strategy: study the rules hard enough that you can break them without sounding like you’re just falling apart.