“Some people are real disillusioned when I tell them about making the record,” says Richard Davis, who supplied what may be the most acclaimed bass lines ever to grace a pop record.

It also sounds like the work of a group of musicians who had become finely attuned to one another through years of working together - but, in fact, Morrison had made his name with rock songs like “Gloria” and “Here Comes the Night,” and he sang Astral Weeks sitting by himself in a glass-enclosed booth, scarcely communicating with the session musicians, who barely knew who he was. He didn’t use the phrase for a song title until a year later, but Astral Weeks was the album on which Van Morrison fully descended “into the mystic.” Morrison’s first full-fledged solo album sounded like nothing else in the pop-music world of 1968: soft, reflective, hypnotic, haunted by the ghosts of old blues singers and ancient Celts and performed by a group of extraordinary jazz musicians, it sounds like the work of a singer and songwriter who is, as Morrison sings in the title track, “nothing but a stranger in this world.”