USA Today Interview (2005)

Here is an interview Van did in 2005 with USA Today:

Van Morrison's 60th birthday is a month away, and while aging does instill a sense of urgency in his creative life, he's not feeling any anxiety about the milestone.

"Not yet, because I'm still 59," he says matter-of-factly. "I can wait."

The legendary Irish singer has never been in a hurry to catch up with the times. The current Magic Time, Morrison's 38th solo release, is his third album in four years to pay homage to the blues and jazz roots that fired his youthful imagination and inspired him to start a recording career 40 years ago.

In 2002, Down the Road stole retro glances at jazz, soul and folk, and 2003's jazz-leaning What's Wrong with This Picture echoed those passions. On Magic Time, he again reaches back, covering Fats Waller's Lonely and Blue, submitting a jaunty, scat-peppered I'm Confessin' and giving a big-band makeover to This Love of Mine. The bluesy Stranded has a doo-wop feel, and the title track is a soulful waltz.

Morrison dismisses modern pop as "too diluted" and prefers mining the '50s and '60s because "that's still the era where the best music was happening," he says by phone from Derry, Northern Ireland.

"It's something I keep referring to, because nothing's ever been as good as that musically."

As a teen, he was particularly swept away by the recordings of Ray Charles, whose death last year "affected me so much on so many levels," says Morrison, who joined him on Crazy Love for the R&B giant's swansong album of duets, Genius Loves Company. "I don't think I would have become a singer if it wasn't for hearing Ray, him being such an inspiration over the years."

Like his other recent albums, Magic Time was culled from a backlog of recordings rather than plotted as a separate entity.

"I never was able to get all the stuff out that I was producing," Morrison says. "It's now accumulated into quite a bit of unreleased stuff. When I have something I want to do, I just lay it down and it goes in the can.

"I'm never really making one record. I decide what to put out from a pool of a lot of tracks."

At the deep end of that pool are long-dormant recordings Morrison hopes to compile into a series called The Unreleased Masters.

"It's an ongoing project that I work on when I get the time," he says. "It's too early to say, but we might get one out in October, some stuff from the early '70s. A lot of the stuff I've forgotten about. I actually don't remember doing it because there was a lot happening and these weren't the mainline records that came out. So it's very exciting for me. It's fresh and new because I haven't heard it in so long."

Though Magic addresses recurring themes — a scorn for corporate swindlers, a desire for privacy — Morrison says the songs are not a window into his world.

"It's quasi-autobiographical," he says. "There's stuff I'm picking up from other places as well. That's the songwriting process. Sometimes you don't remember where you picked things up because it goes into your subconscious and comes out at a later date."

They Sold Me Out sounds like another swipe at the music industry, but Morrison backs away from that interpretation.

"I don't really have anything against the music business," he says. "I'm independent, right? To me, it's an archetypical story. It's not just about me. It's probably happened to everyone who's tried to be an artist."

Likewise, he distances himself from the sentiments in Just Like Greta, a tune that name-drops Greta Garbo in expressing a yearning for solitude.

"That's more literal to a movie star than to me," he says. "It's not to be taken literally."

The notoriously aloof singer not only rejects trappings of celebrity, but he also refuses to concede that he is a celebrity, despite four decades of stardom. He seldom reveals personal details, even to refute rumors or flawed biographies "written by third-party observers or so-called friends who are mainly losers. That's my only comment on that."

Asked to expand on a line in Keep Mediocrity at Bay that says politics, religion and superstition go hand in hand, Morrison says simply, "I'm apolitical."

Pause.

"Well, you can't totally stay out of it if you live on planet Earth," he says. "Get on with what you do; that's what the song is saying. Keep out of the way of as much B.S. as you can."

Morrison's reticence and his distrust of modernity played roles in long delaying his official Web site. It was launched recently at www.vanmorrison.com.

He contributed zilch.

"I'm not involved in the Web site at all," he says. "I just authorized it because it gives me more independence for products. I'm not interested in Web sites."

It's safe to presume, then, that Morrison is not an Internet surfer.

"Dead right."

That brings us back to those aging twinges.

"Getting older kind of makes you sharper about what you want to do and how much time you've got to do it," he says. "I don't want to waste time."