Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Time is Van Morrison’s great theme, recurring throughout his immense discography of 48 studio albums. Like Bob Dylan, he’s a ceaselessly touring performer whose music has settled into an unvarying groove, like one vast, never-ending song, as if trying to stop “precious time” from “slipping away”, as he sang in a 1999 single. Unlike Dylan, the illusion of perpetuity is enhanced by his voice, which remains miraculously untouched by the passing years.

The Belfast singer-songwriter turned 80 last year. The pace of his output has picked up recently. Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge is the seventh studio album that he has released in the 2020s, one less than the total from the previous decade. Fury at time lost to Covid lockdowns spurred an outburst of bad-tempered song-writing in 2021’s Latest Record Project, Volume 1 and 2022’s What’s It Gonna Take?, but he has simmered down since then.

Last year’s Remembering Now dwelt on recollections of his initiation into the world of music, like a river obeying “the deep summons of the sea”, in Charles Dickens’ evocative phrase. This contemplative late-career highlight arrived amid a series of covers albums paying tribute to the skiffle and rock and roll songs that influenced him in his youth, a more literal reinterpretation of the past.

The album cover of ‘Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge’.

Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge continues the sequence. It finds him turning his attention to the blues, the genre that inspired him to start singing as a teenager, barking Leadbelly songs as gruffly as possible while his father and uncle played harmonica. Leadbelly’s “On a Monday” is among the covers here, scrubbed up into amiable roots music with blues old-timer Taj Mahal on banjo, harmonica and co-vocals. Another venerable guest, Buddy Guy, appears on Willie Dickson’s comically boastful “I’m Ready” and also the classic 12-bar blues of BB King’s “Rock Me Baby”.

There are 20 tracks in all, lasting about 80 minutes. The tempo hardly changes, but the musicianship is first-rate, a companionable medley of walking basslines, honky-tonk keyboards, deft guitar solos and brightly gusting harmonica. Van Morrison slurs, hollers and scats with evergreen force. “Man, if I play my cards right, I can take everything right back to the start,” he cries in his self-penned song “Loving Memories”. The album might not rank among his royal flushes, but it makes for a winning hand.

★★★☆☆

‘Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge’ is released by Orangefield Records