Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

Van Morrison punctures the romantic myth of songwriting as pure confession with one unglamorous truth: craft is scavenging, and sound often beats sense. The line lands because it’s both a demystification and a sly permission slip. We like to imagine artists as conduits for meaning; Morrison shrugs and reminds you that sometimes the conduit is just chasing a rhyme.

The intent is practical, almost workmanlike. “Different places” gestures at the collage method baked into popular music: blues phrases, gospel cadences, overheard talk, old books, yesterday’s melodies. He’s not apologizing for borrowing; he’s normalizing it. The punch comes in the second half: a “line…because it rhymes.” That’s the confession that the ear can be the boss. In a medium where lyrics ride on groove and vowel shape, “sense” is only one of several currencies. Rhyme is a kind of sonic glue; it creates inevitability, the feeling that a song is clicking into place even if the sentence wouldn’t survive outside the melody.

Subtext: listeners do a lot of the meaning-making. A nonsensical line can still hit emotionally if it arrives at the right moment, sung with conviction, framed by harmony. Morrison, famously prickly about interpretation, is also quietly asserting control: don’t overread me. The context is a late-20th-century rock tradition that prizes authenticity while being built from templates and theft. He’s pointing at the trick without killing the magic, which is exactly the trick.