Listen to The Lion

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There are moments when Morrison can inflect a lyric like Mose Allison, other times when he can spin out a blues line like John Lee Hooker. It's a daft and reckless mix, but Morrison makes it work through sheer force of spirit, what he once called, in a memorable song, the "inarticulate speech of the heart." His rhythms are irresistible, his lyrics like an amalgam of Yeats, Kerouac and Chuck Berry. The Irish tenor John McCormack said what distinguishes an important voice from a good one is the indescribable but crucial quality that he termed "the yarrrrragh." The yarrrrragh, critic Greil Marcus points out, is "a mythic incantation . . . To Morrison ((it is)) the gift of the muse and the muse itself."

You can hear Morrison courting this muse in the Pentecostal growls and incantations of Listen to the Lion on his 1972 album Saint Dominic's Preview, or personifying it on his new album in Village Idiot, whose protagonist "wears his overcoat in the summer/ And short sleeves in the winter time" but who is nourished by some secret spiritual serenity: "Don't you know he's onto something . . . / Sometimes he looks so happy/ As he goes strolling by."

Like this sainted idiot, Morrison seems to be sustained by some spiritual essence. He also shares with the idiot a contempt for catering to anyone, a disdain for superficial cool. Morrison, 46, looks like a cross between a puff adder and a pub keeper, and will never seem beguiling in a video. As he sings about his boyhood, weaving references to Sidney Bechet and Hank Williams into a tune that draws on the hymn Just a Closer Walk with Thee, it's obvious he is only trying to keep a clear through-line to living memory.

That connection is all that's important, and once achieved and maintained, it needs no gift wrapping. No major show-biz showmanship. No kissing up to MTV, no interviews in the press. Morrison is his own best reporter and interpreter, as he makes plain on the chiding Why Must I Always Explain: "Well it's out on the highway and it's on with the show/ Always telling people things they're too lazy to know/ It can make you crazy, yeah it can drive you insane . . ."

Some listeners might be tempted to say this Belfast cowboy -- as the Band's Robbie Robertson once called him in a song -- is, in fact, a little mad. But if so, his is a fine madness. Morrison asks his own questions ("Can you feel the silence?") and provides his own answers ("((We)) carried on dreaming in God"). Those very dreams are the songs he shares. His music is a perpetual state of grace.