Rather, this music comes from the perspective of a young man realizing everything he has will erode, an awareness arriving while the wonder of life has yet to fade. Death flows through the album but doom doesn't cloud each moment. It is youthful and old, the first flowering of expanded consciousness, one not yet tarnished by either tragedy or cynicism but impeded by an encroaching sense of mortality. Generalized longing-for a lover or a friend, for a certain time or place, for a younger version of yourself-is one of the defining elements of Astral Weeks, an album where spirituality, mysticism, and death intertwine on a vast expanding plane. An undercurrent of melancholy desire runs through "Brown Eyed Girl"-Van pines for a moment as it's passing-and Astral Weeks brings that yearning to the forefront as it ventures into the slipstream of memories, dreams, and regret. Berns was determined to get the record on the charts because that's where the money was, so the single sounded peppier than its lyric, a disconnect Morrison later noted. Much of the ebullience of "Brown Eyed Girl" derives from its AM-radio friendly arrangement, a sound encouraged by Bert Berns, the head of Van's label Bang.
Van Morrison released Astral Weeks in November 1968, not even 18 months after cracking the Billboard Top 10 with "Brown Eyed Girl".
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