Because Morrison refused interview requests for the article, Walsh constructed him using other people’s memories. It was a chaotic moment in the singer’s young career. It’s not obscure knowledge that Morrison spent time living in Boston in the late ’60s, but no one had bothered to ask the question that was central to Walsh’s article “What was he doing there at all?” The answer, as Walsh discovered, is that he was laying low after the dissolution of his band Them, drinking himself into oblivion, and fighting with producer Bert Berns’s Bang Records. Walsh’s Astral Weeks began as a Boston magazine feature, published in 2015. As they wind in and out, the lines between coincidence and some deeper connective tissue between events become blurry, or at least open to interpretation.

Taken together, these different pieces form the atmosphere in which Van Morrison was working and living while writing the material that would become the groundbreaking album from which Walsh took the other half of his title. They inform and bounce off each other, and all share a center in Boston, Massachusetts Walsh’s hometown. Walsh’s Secret History of 1968 is a breakdown of the titular year into a dozen or so stories. I instantly called my wife (Walsh is married to musician Marissa Nadler). He remembers, for example, that when the deal with Penguin became certain, “it was like, all of a sudden, I felt like I was in a movie. That kind of attention might go straight to some people’s heads but when I talk with Walsh over coffee in San Francisco, where he’s visiting for a reading at the city’s Green Apple Bookstore, he seems to be taking it all in stride. Not only is his debut book out with a major publisher, Penguin Press, but articles in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Mojo, The New York Times, PopMatters, and dozens of other publications, have greeted its arrival. With the publication of Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, author Ryan Walsh is experiencing the kind of success aspiring authors can spend their lives dreaming about.

Van morrison astral weeks books