On Pay The Devil Van Morrison continues exploring classic country

After a career spanning over 40 years and over 30 albums, Van Morrison has earned the soubriquet of 'legend'. From his work with Them to the awe-inspiring run of solo albums in the 1980s, he's been responsible for some of the most magical, inspiring music ever created. In 1962, Ray Charles, one of Morrison’s biggest influences, recorded the monumental Modern Sounds In Country & Western Music. At the time the genre jump seemed risky, but Charles proved that a great artist could make it work if he worked with great songs. Morrison, who has successfully recorded jazz, rock, R&B, blues, Celtic, skiffle and more, proves that theory to be valid. Inspired by, as ever, America's rich music scene, the Belfast Cowboy returns with a deeply soulful album. On Pay The DevilVan Morrison continues exploring classic country with compelling reinterpretations of his favorite standards from the 1950s to the 1970s ranging from tracks that even the most casual of country music fan will recognize to lesser known songs. There are also three Morrison originals thrown in.

Morrison’s originals here are among the highlights

Pay The Devil is a seamless transition into country. The arrangements are appropriately spare, with fiddle, steel and acoustic guitar, bass, and drums propping up most of the songs, while strings and backing vocals flesh things out on occasion. Pay The Devil is a true tribute to Morrison’s genius as a vocal stylist that he can take a song as often covered as Half As Much – recorded over the years by everyone from Hank Williams to Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris – and manage to make it feel new all over again. One of Pay The Devil’s many highlights is Morrison’s take on George Jones's Things Have Gone To Pieces. Then there’s What Am I Living For, an old Chuck Willis number. Listen to how Morrison delivers Rodney Crowell’s early masterpiece Till I Gain Control Again, one of the more recent copyrights included here and a standout effort on an album full of them. Yet even among such high standards, Morrison’s originals here are among the highlights – including Playhouse, a sly, infectious song that one wishes the Genius of Soul had lived to record, and the title track. Pay The Devil reiterates Morrison's own musical diversity and flair for making any song his own.

A classic album that sounds like Nashville at its finest

It requires either incredible audacity or singular brilliance for a singer to tackle classic songs to which other superstar artists have long ago affixed their names and definitive interpretations. Luckily, on Morrison's first full-blown foray into the country music catalog, brilliance shines throughout. Pitch-perfect arrangements and instrumentation notwithstanding, it would be crass reductionism to consider Pay The Devil the "Van Morrison country album." It is simply the Man and his Music, as amazing as ever. To listen to Pay The Devil, one might naturally assume that Morrison has traveled to Nashville and handed himself over to Music City’s finest players and producers. Remarkably, Morrison has done nothing of the sort – recording Pay The Devil in Ireland with the same wonderful musicians who have been playing with him for years now with exceptional results. Even more remarkably, it turns out that Morrison has never even been to Nashville before. Regardless of that, he has made a classic album that sounds like Nashville at its finest and stands as tall as anything that’s come out of the town in recent years. Pay The Devil is not just great country music, it’s great music – whatever country you happen to come from.

06.03.2006