If I ventured in the slipstream between the viaducts of your dream . . .

Liel Leibovitz on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks:

[N]o other album, I believe, surpasses the audacity, the wonder, the desperation, and the joy of Astral Weeks. It is of all musical genres and of none at all, and its lyrics—with lines like “If I ventured in the slipstream/ Between the viaducts of your dream”—are as close as pop would ever get to closing its eyes and dreaming. For spiritual seekers, people willing to wander for a few decades in the desert because they know for certain that the promised land awaits, there can be no better companion than this record.

Lester Bangs, perhaps the finest rock writer who ever lived, was one of those seekers. “Van Morrison was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when he made this record,” Bangs wrote. “There are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend.”