“Pretending my life is not in ruins/Pretending I’m not depressed.” So ran the opening lines on Pretending, the quietly devastating final song of Van Morrison’s last album of new music, 2022’s What’s It Gonna Take. Maybe you didn’t make it that far, beaten down by all those songs about government mind control and the World Economic Forum. But here was the sound of a man in crisis, unsure whether he was having “some kind of breakthrough [or] a nervous breakdown” and putting it all in song.
Well, something has changed, and maybe it was that act of excoriating self-analysis. Because, after two restorative 2022 covers albums (Moving On Skiffle and the pointedly titled Accentuate the Positive) and last year’s archive…
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