Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl | ||||
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Live album by Van Morrison | ||||
Released |
UK February 9, 2009 US February 24, 2009 |
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Recorded | November 7, November 8, 2008 | |||
Venue | Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California | |||
Genre | Folk-rock | |||
Length | 68:46 | |||
Label | Listen to the Lion Records | |||
Producer | Van Morrison | |||
Van Morrison chronology | ||||
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Professional ratings | |
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Aggregate scores | |
Source | Rating |
Metacritic | 77/100 |
Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
Allmusic | |
Blurt | |
Daily Mirror | |
Entertainment Weekly | A− |
The Independent | |
The Observer | |
Paste | (82) |
PopMatters | |
RTÉ.ie | |
Rolling Stone |
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl is the fifth live album recorded by Northern Irish singer/songwriter Van Morrison, and released in the US on February 24, 2009 (see 2009 in music) and on February 9, 2009, in the UK. It was recorded during two live concerts at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, California in 2008 and released on Morrison's new Listen to the Lion label and distributed by EMI.
The live performances of the eight original songs that feature on the album were recorded on November 7 and 08, 2008. Coincidentally, they took place forty years after the classic Astral Weeks was first released by Warner Bros. Records in 1968. One of the original musicians, guitarist Jay Berliner, joined with the many other musicians on the revisited version of Astral Weeks.
The New York Daily News in the January 4 edition named Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl as one of the "Five Most Anticipated Pop Music Events for 2009".
A DVD of performances from the concerts, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film is an Amazon.com Exclusive and was released on May 19, 2009.
The album won Live Album of the Year at the MPG awards held on February 11, 2010.
With only one rehearsal prior to the concerts and with Morrison, as producer, insisting on no post-production engineering, the live album sounds essentially as it was heard by the concert goers. Morrison has said about the concerts and live sound of the recording: "The Hollywood Bowl concerts gave me a welcome opportunity to perform these songs the way I originally intended them to be." He was further quoted: "There are certain dynamics you can get in live recordings that you cannot get in a studio recording...There was a distinct alchemy happening on that stage in Hollywood. I felt it." "The new record was recorded live, what [you hear] is what was played in its raw form. There was no mixing, no tweaking, no post-production at all, and I like that raw and edgy sound in real time."