Woodstock, New York — Van Morrison's Tupelo Honey period

After the rupturing intensity of Astral Weeks and the more structured Moondance that followed it, Van Morrison settled in Woodstock, New York — the small town in Ulster County in the Catskill foothills that had become, after the 1969 festival that bore its name but was held miles away, a community of musicians, writers, and artists who wanted proximity to New York without the city's pace. Bob Dylan had been there since the mid-1960s. The Band were based in the area. It was a place where serious musicians could work quietly, and Morrison worked quietly there for several years.

The album he made in Woodstock in 1971 was Tupelo Honey — his most domestically contented record, suffused with the warmth of a settled life in a way that almost nothing he made before or after quite matched. He had married Janet Planet the previous year; the album is addressed to her, or to the feeling of the life they had together in those hills. "Wild Night," "Old Old Woodstock," the title track — the music has a looseness and joy that is immediately recognisable as belonging to a specific period of someone's life, the period when things are, temporarily, uncomplicated. Van Morrison does not sound uncomplicated for long, and he didn't stay in Woodstock forever. But the album exists as evidence of the time when he did.

Woodstock the town is small, walkable, full of galleries and independent shops, and has absorbed its music history with the particular self-awareness of a place that knows what it represents. Dylan's Byrdcliffe area retreats, the Band's Big Pink down the road in West Saugerties, Morrison's quieter domestic years — the landscape of the Catskills produced a specific American music in the early 1970s that could only have come from this particular combination of proximity, quiet, and the sense of being just far enough from everything else.