Veedon Fleece Deluxe Edition Vinyl 180 gram emerald green vinyl (Peorder expected despatch approximately 25th of March)

Deluxe Edition Vinyl

?180 gram emerald green vinyl

?Heavyweight tip on style jacket

?First vinyl reissue in 30 years

Collectible Art Print

? Created by named artists

? Perfect for collecting 

Cocktail Recipe

? Custom mix of spirits

? Inspired by this album

Veedon Fleece is the eighth  by   , released in October 1974 (see ). Morrison recorded the album shortly after his  from wife Janet (Planet) Rigsbee. With his broken marriage in the past, Morrison visited  on holiday for new inspiration, arriving on 20 October 1973 (with his  at the time, Carol Guida). While there he wrote?in fewer than three weeks?the songs included on the album (except "", "Country Fair" and "Come Here My Love").

It has been compared to  with the same "stream of consciousness" lyrics but musically it is more ,  and heavily influenced by Morrison's Irish trip. It has been called a genuinely underground album that he seemed to disown quickly after recording and has been referred to as Morrison's "forgotten masterpiece".

Contents Preorde
Background[]

During the summer months of 1973, Morrison had embarked on a three-month tour with his eleven-piece band, . Although the resulting concerts and live album, , have come to be known as a performing high for Morrison, the tour was physically and emotionally exhausting. Morrison decided afterwards to take a vacation break, returning to Ireland after a six-year absence obtensibly to record an  national TV show. Having gone through divorce proceedings earlier in the year, Morrison was now accompanied by his new fiancee, Carol Guida. The vacation visit lasted nearly three weeks during which time he only toured the southern part of the island and did not venture into his native  as the province was engulfed in the .

Recording[]

In 1978, Morrison recalled that he recorded the songs about four weeks after writing them: "Veedon Fleece was a bunch of songs that I wrote and then I just recorded it about four weeks after I wrote it. When you make an album you write some songs; you might have four songs and maybe you write two more, suddenly you've got enough songs for an album." According to the drummer Dahaud Shaar, the tracks were laid down in a very informal manner: "During that time I kinda haunted the studio, and Van would come in and we'd just do tracks." David Hayes recalled about the recording sessions: "Every night for about a week he came in with two or three new tunes and we just started playing with him." Jim Rothermel also recalled that during the California recording sessions for the album the songs were often a first take and that the band members had sometimes not heard the songs previously. The strings and woodwinds were arranged by  in a New York studio. The song "Come Here My Love" was inspired during the week of the sessions and another song "Country Fair" was left over from the Hard Nose the Highway album and provided a fitting sense of closure. "" and "Cul de Sac" were recut in New York later with musicians with whom Morrison had never worked before: guitarist John Tropea, bassist Joe Macho and drummer Allen Schwarzberg. Given a  treatment, these songs were released as the  for the album."

Composition[] "Veedon Fleece initiates a period of growing poetical confidence, with a muse that, while still often stream-of-consciousness, is more under the control of the lyricist."

, (2009).

The songs, as recorded on the album, were influenced by his vacation trip to  in 1973; it was his first visit since he left  in 1967. (At this time his parents had moved to California and resided near him.) According to : "Veedon Fleece from a lyrical standpoint, shows maturity, renewed poetical confidence, and a direct nod to actual literary influences." Hage further comments that musically it "can be seen as a companion album to Astral Weeks. The soft and complex musical textures (often augmented by flute) of this album are the closest he will ever again get to that vaunted 1968 album."

The opening track, "Fair Play" derived its name from Morrison's Irish friend, Donall Corvin's repeated use of the Irish colloquialism "fair play to you" as a wry compliment. It's a 3/4 ballad that name checks ,  and . According to Morrison, the song derived "from what was running through my head" and it marked a return to the stream of consciousness channeled song-writing that had not been evident since several of the songs contained in his 1972 album, .

"Linden Arden Stole the Highlights" segues into "Who Was That Masked Man" (sung in ) which has a similar melody. The  pertains to a mythological   living in  who, when cornered, turns violent and then goes into hiding, "living with a gun", and references a childhood interest in The Lone Ranger. Morrison described the anti-hero Linden Arden as being "about an image of an Irish American living in San Francisco - it's really a hard man type of thing, whilst the latter was a song about what it's like when you absolutely cannot trust anybody. Not as in some paranoia, but in reality."

"" describes a perfect day in "God's green land" and is a tribute to the  town visited during this vacation trip. The opening lines of the song: "And as we walked through the streets of Arklow, oh the colours of the day warm, and our heads were filled with poetry, in the morning coming onto dawn" were said to "contain the thematic seeds of the whole album: nature, poetry, god, innocence re-found and love lost" by  critic John Kennedy.

"" is frequently regarded as one of Morrison's most accomplished compositions. He revealed that the song owed a considerable debt to his readings in .  felt that this track was representative of "an experimental peak, a step beyond even his most ambitious work."

On the second side of the album, the songs "" and "" focus on  to America and homecoming.

The album concludes with the love songs, "Comfort You", "Come Here My Love", and "Country Fair"?the latter two employing the traditional Irish  style. To Clinton Heylin, the songs also spoke to "the healing power of love... here at last are songs that speak of what he can do for her, rather than concerned solely with his needs and wants." Heylin comments on the song, "Come Here My Love": "This is no 'Autumn Song'. Rather, it sounds a lot like a man learning how to love again." Morrison spoke of "Country Fair" as having the same kind of feeling as "", although that song was used to open the  album, instead of as a kind of closure.

Years before "Twilight Zone" was released as a bonus track on the 2008 re-mastered version of Veedon Fleece,  had said about the version of the song on : "'Twilight Zone' is a very slow, bluesy, late-night song that would fit right in on Veedon Fleece."

Critical reception[] Professional ratingsRetrospective reviewsReview scoresSourceRatingB+

When Veedon Fleece was released, it sold poorly and was received unfavourably by critics from  and . The latter wrote that the first side of the album features "some of his least memorable shots at songwriting since Tupelo Honey". Jim Miller from Rolling Stone found the entire album "self-indulgent" and called it "mood music for mature hippies."

In a retrospective review for  (2004),  hailed Veedon Fleece as "the culmination of everything Van was doing up to that point, all Celtic mystic tumult in the vocals and pastoral beauty in the music" and ranked it among "his most majestic music".  critics Jason Ankeny and Thom Jurek called the album "brilliant" and commented that "With its elegiac tone and deeply autobiographical lyrics, this was a Morrison who didn't so readily associate himself with the feel-good, peace, love, and rhythm & blues sound American audiences were used to." John Kennedy from  felt it is beautiful in the sense defined by French poet , "a poet's album, a jazz lover's album, a masterpiece of soul-singing, a blue and green journey into the places of the heart that were first opened up for dowsing with Astral Weeks." Derek Miller of  believed it is astonishing, "so frothy and thick, that requires silence when it's over ... To me that's the better explanation for Morrison's three-year absence. He'd just finished Veedon Fleece."  was less enthusiastic in  (1981), and said it is Morrison's most shamelessly cathartic work since , "soothing, evocative late-night music", but suffers from his long-windedness and a second side highlighted only by "Bulbs".

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