Van Morrison – Someone Like You Review

Between the dribbling lockdown songs and vaguely moved cover works, Van Morrison has had a poor start to the decade. This ill-fated continuation of his career goes on with Someone Like You, ripped from the already putrid and rotting collection of covers he is set to provide. A third in two years. Someone stop him. Covering his work, following a trend started and stopped by U2 and Neil Young last year. Always playing catch-up, and this is no different. No reason can be pulled for why he needed overtime on a Poetic Champions Compose song, not least one as ill-remembered as Someone Like You. But here it is. One for the die-hard fans convinced that, by saying they like it enough times, they actually will. But there is little, if any, spark to this turgid release. A bold song turned dull by the man who wrote it.  

His dangerous travel around the world and the eventual grasp of love after a long time is magnificent in the original. Someone Like You is a hidden gem of his discography and the powerful, well-placed string and piano instrumentals are a compliment to his vocal strength. A bit soppy, for sure, but performed with enough conviction to make it work. The soul-searching he mentioned in the original piece is lacking on the do-over. These are gearing up to be nothing more than collections of old recordings. Why let them gather dust when they can make a few pennies? Someone Like You has Joss Stone weigh in on the vocal parts for Morrison is no longer capable of spanning emotional range. Or at least his latest works would have you believe this.  

Someone Like You reduces the intimate percussion and piano work of the original and has a near-identical Morrison performance. But the change of tone and tempo is a change not just to Morrison’s voice, but his attitude towards the song itself. Those very unshaken fundamentals are not changed enough to warrant a new release. Stone adds little, if anything to this bass-driven performance. Brass is no substitute for the well-considered original arrangements. Now, Someone Like You sounds like a lover’s tiff between Stone and Morrison’s portrayals rather than the longing for the open road, the candid nature with which Morrison initially dealt with his openness in the original. It is lost, not for good as the original lives on, but there is a massive loss to the quality of Someone Like You.  

No longer is it enough for Morrison to see his soul-searching ways as a reason to return home but as a way to evict a partner who has overstayed their welcome. Painful reinventions, what little there are on this, mark a tired expectation of the revisionist period of an artist who is lyrically spent. Return to the older issues, the bits and pieces which can be cobbled together. It will impress those who have lost their love for the original recordings, either through repeat playing or a desperation to hear their favourite perform again. But where other artists have a charm to their extra releases, Morrison does it without the formula which makes it so successful. New Arrangements and Duets only offer these pieces because there is nowhere else to place them. It feels artificial, and pieces like Someone Like You, as fine as they are, feel cheap because of it.