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Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl

Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
AstralWeeksLiveHWB.jpg
Live album by Van Morrison
Released UK February 9, 2009
US February 24, 2009
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
Keep It Simple
(2008)Keep It Simple2008
Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl
(2009)
Born to Sing: No Plan B
(2012)Born to Sing: No Plan B2012
Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source Rating
Metacritic 77/100
Review scores
Source Rating
Allmusic 4/5 stars
Blurt 10/10 stars
Daily Mirror 5/5 stars
Entertainment Weekly A−
The Independent 5/5 stars
The Observer 4/5 stars
Paste (82)
PopMatters 8/10 stars
RTÉ.ie 4/5 stars
Rolling Stone 3.5/5 stars

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."


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