And It Stoned Me

Van Morrison's "And It Stoned Me," opening Moondance, is a sun-warmed reverie of boyhood transmuted into something close to sacrament. Rolling piano, easy electric guitar, and a relaxed shuffle frame a memory of two kids walking to go fishing, stopping for water at an old man's well, getting caught in the rain — small events Morrison renders as overwhelming grace. His voice is the instrument that sells it: gravelly yet tender, sliding into the elongated vowels and ecstatic repetitions of "stoned me just like jelly roll," the phrasing scatting toward a feeling words can't hold. The Celtic-soul fusion is gentle here, more pastoral than the album's jazzier corners, with organ swells lending a churchlike glow. Emotionally it lives in pure nostalgia without sentimentality — the intoxication isn't drugs but the natural world flooding a child's senses, water from heaven, the body dissolving into landscape. There's a mystic streak that runs through all Morrison's best work, the ordinary made luminous. Lyrically it's almost plotless, just sensation and weather and the timelessness of a summer day. Ideal for an unhurried morning, a long drive through green country, or any moment you want to be reminded that wonder used to come free. It is one of pop's purest distillations of remembered innocence.