Art & Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

You can hear Morrison tipping his hat without taking it off. “Probably” does a lot of work here: it’s modest, slippery, anti-mythmaking. He’s not offering a neatly packaged origin story for the press kit; he’s sketching a memory the way musicians often do, half instinct and half atmosphere. That vagueness is the point. Imagination, not “influence,” is the keyword - a tell that what mattered wasn’t technique or genre allegiance but the sensation of possibility.

Choosing Ray Charles Live at Newport as the spark is also a stealth manifesto. Newport was a space where American music tried to launder itself into respectability - jazz festivals, critics, the idea of the canon. Ray Charles shows up and blows the walls out with a performance that refuses tidy categories: gospel fervor, blues grit, big-band punch, pop timing. It’s music that sounds like it’s crossing a border and daring you to follow. For a Northern Irish kid who’d later make his own career out of crossing lines - R&B into Celtic folk, jazz phrasing into rock structure, mysticism into street-level storytelling - that’s not just inspiring. It’s permission.

The subtext is Morrison locating his artistic DNA in a live document, not a studio artifact. Live at Newport isn’t about perfection; it’s about voltage: the band, the crowd, the risk. He’s telling you the kind of artist he respects - one who turns performance into a weather system and makes belief feel physical.