The Prayer the World Mistook for a Wedding Song: The Battles Behind Van Morrison’s ‘Have I Told You Lately’

It may be the most successful song Van Morrison ever wrote, and for a remarkable number of the people who love it, it is not his song at all. “Have I Told You Lately” has been danced to at more weddings than anyone can count, voted one of the great love songs of all time, and played on the radio so often that by 2007 it had passed four million airplays in the United States alone. Yet the version burned into the public memory — the one that climbed to number five on both sides of the Atlantic and sat at the top of the American adult contemporary chart for five weeks — belongs to Rod Stewart, who did not write a word of it. Morrison’s own recording, released as a single in June 1989, peaked at number 74 in Britain. A song its author conceived as a prayer became a wedding-industry standard in somebody else’s voice, and the battle over whose song it really is has been running, quietly and lucratively, ever since.

That is only the strangest of the fights folded into these four minutes and twenty seconds. “Have I Told You Lately” was built on the framework of an earlier Morrison ballad, opened with a line borrowed from a Stax soul record, and was cut in a matter of days for an album that a nervous record company needed to restore its writer’s commercial standing. It was praised on release as an instant classic and largely ignored by British record buyers in the same week. It won a Grammy — but for a remake Morrison recorded with The Chieftains, not for the original. And it ended up, as we will see, being played at the World Trade Center on the morning of 11 September 2001, piped through the plaza speakers as Muzak, about an hour before the first plane struck: perhaps the most haunting evidence imaginable of how completely the song had dissolved into the background of modern life. This is the story of how a private prayer became public property — and of what it cost, and paid, the difficult man who wrote it.

A Prayer, Not a Proposal

The first thing to understand about “Have I Told You Lately” is that it was not written to a woman. Morrison has always been reticent about his songs, but the standard accounts of this one are consistent: it was originally written as a prayer, a song addressed upward rather than across a room. That origin is there in the lyric for anyone who listens past the first line. The singer gives thanks for a love that eases his soul, and then the song makes its decisive turn, contrasting human affection with a greater presence: “there’s a love that’s divine and it’s yours and it’s mine”. Earthly love, in Morrison’s construction, is a reflection of a sacred one — which is precisely why the song works simultaneously as a devotional exercise and as a first dance. Each listener hears the address they need.

Brian Hinton, in his biography Celtic Crossroads, heard the theology and the romance fused exactly as intended. “One of the finest love songs of the century,” he wrote, “which I remember devastated me when I first heard it, as it seemed both something never quite said before, and yet a song I felt I had known forever. Earthly love transmutes into that for God, just like in Dante… The morning sun has set by the end of the song, suggesting love shading into death, but subtly.” The Dante comparison is not decorative. Hinton reads the beloved in Morrison’s late-eighties songs through the figure of Beatrice in the Divine Comedy, the woman who leads the pilgrim toward God — and on Avalon Sunset, the album the song came from, that reading fits an entire record saturated with pilgrimage, prayer and gratitude.

By 1989 Morrison had arrived at this material the long way round. He was forty-three, two decades past the commercial chaos of his beginnings, and well into the most openly spiritual phase of his career. The albums of the mid-eighties — Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, A Sense of Wonder, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, Poetic Champions Compose — had traded the snarling R&B of his youth for meditation, healing and metaphysics, to the bafflement of some critics and the devotion of a loyal audience. In 1988 he had gone home, musically speaking, recording Irish Heartbeat with The Chieftains, a set of traditional Irish songs that reconnected him with the music of his Belfast childhood. Avalon Sunset, the album that followed, was where the two currents met: Celtic feeling and explicit faith, wrapped in the most polished and accessible production of his career. “Have I Told You Lately” sat at its centre, fourth track in, immediately after a song that reads almost like a stage direction for it: “I’d Love to Write Another Song”, in which Morrison promises, “In poetry I’d carve it well / I’d even make it rhyme.” Then he does.

Built on Another Song, Opened with a Borrowed Line

For all its air of timeless inevitability, “Have I Told You Lately” was assembled from parts, and Morrison — a songwriter who has always treated his own catalogue as a quarry — knew it. Erik Hage, in The Words and Music of Van Morrison, notes that the song was composed as a love ballad “built on the framework” of “Someone Like You”, the aching ballad Morrison had released two years earlier on Poetic Champions Compose. The melodic and structural bones are shared; what changed was the centre of gravity. Where “Someone Like You” longs for a person not yet found, “Have I Told You Lately” gives thanks for a presence already there. The searching of the earlier song is resolved, and the resolution is what made the new one indestructible: it is a song for people who have arrived, which is why couples about to marry claimed it within months and have never given it back.

The borrowing at the song’s head is even older and reaches outside his own work. The opening line — the question that gives the song its title — is taken from “I Forgot to Be Your Lover”, the William Bell record released on Stax in 1968. Bell’s song is a confession of neglect from a man who worked too hard and loved too little; its narrator asks whether he has remembered to say the words. Morrison, who had been steeped in Memphis soul since he was a teenager playing saxophone in Belfast showbands, lifted the question and rebuilt it as gratitude rather than guilt. It is a characteristic move, and an honest kind of theft: the line is a homage embedded in the foundation, audible to anyone who knows the Bell record, and it roots Morrison’s hymn in the soul tradition that formed him. When the song later circled back through the soul and country worlds — covered by Kenny Rogers, Barbara Mandrell, Della Reese, Engelbert Humperdinck and the great Nashville pianist Floyd Cramer among many others — it was, in a sense, going home.

What Morrison added to the borrowed opening and the recycled framework was the part nobody else could have written: the slow widening of the song’s address from a lover to a creator and back again, until the two become impossible to separate. The arrangement on Avalon Sunset mirrors that movement. The record opens with piano and strings in a register close to easy listening — Record Mirror, reviewing the single, sneered that there was “a really slushy bit of piano in this that my mum would love” — but the performance underneath is unhurried and plain, Morrison singing with the conversational directness of a man saying something he has decided he means. The restraint is the point. A prayer does not need to shout.

Two Days to Rehearse, Two Days to Record

Avalon Sunset was Morrison’s nineteenth studio album, and it was made at a speed that its polish conceals. The album was recorded in November and December 1988 at a string of English studios — The Wool Hall in Beckington, and Eden, Olympic, Westside and Townhouse in London — with Morrison producing himself. The band was substantially new, and it marked the first appearance alongside Morrison of Georgie Fame, the British R&B organist and singer, who played Hammond organ, sang backing vocals and helped direct the band. Fame would become a fixture of Morrison’s stage bands for years; his presence signals the album’s sound before a note is played — warm, churchy, steeped in the same club R&B both men had grown up on.

The sessions ran on Morrison’s lifelong faith in spontaneity. The all-new songs were rehearsed in two days and then recorded in another two. Guitarist Arty McGlynn remembered the band walking away half-dazed: “we still don’t know if it’s an album, or maybe a demo for an album.” That uncertainty was structural, not accidental. Morrison has always believed that a performance captured early carries a charge that polishing destroys, and he can be heard, on “Daring Night”, late in the album, literally calling chord changes to the band on “Daring Night” — “one-four, one-four” — as the take rolls. “Have I Told You Lately”, recorded late in 1988, is a product of that method: a song that sounds considered to the point of serenity, made fast, by musicians who were not entirely sure what they had done.

The album was previewed at a private concert at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London on 24 May 1989, and released on Mercury Records on 2 June. Its opening track, “Whenever God Shines His Light”, was a duet with Cliff Richard — Britain’s most durable pop Christian — and it reached number 20 in the UK, a signal that Morrison’s spiritual turn was not the commercial exile some had predicted. Robert Christgau, the Village Voice critic who served as the era’s hanging judge, gave the album an A-minus and called that duet Morrison’s most exuberant song since “Cleaning Windows” in 1982. Spin’s Karen Schoemer praised “an elegantly orchestrated record void of pain”, adding: “He celebrates nature, love and poetry too; this is contemplation without conflict, remembrances without bitterness. And no matter how esoteric things get, a charged sensuality permeates.” The stage was set, in other words, for the album’s centrepiece ballad to do very well. It did — eventually, and mostly for other people.

The Sound of Gratitude

The recording itself deserves a closer listen, because its battles are audible. Avalon Sunset is the most lavishly upholstered album of Morrison’s career to that point: Fiachra Trench provided the brass and string arrangements, Gavyn Wright led the string section, and the band — Neil Drinkwater on piano and keyboards, Arty McGlynn’s guitar, Clive Culbertson and Steve Pearce sharing bass duties, Roy Jones and Dave Early on drums, with Georgie Fame’s Hammond organ glowing underneath — was a small orchestra by Morrison’s standards. The genre tags the record has collected tell the story of its balancing act: Celtic, folk rock, soft rock, with gospel threaded through. “Have I Told You Lately”, running four minutes and twenty seconds, sits exactly at the join of all four. The strings do not swamp the song because Morrison, producing, keeps his own voice dry and forward, singing the verses in an almost conversational baritone, as if the splendour around him were weather he had decided to ignore.

Structurally, the song is a model of economy, which is part of why other singers found it so easy to pick up and carry. The question of the title is asked and answered in cycles; the middle of the song lifts into its most explicitly devotional passage, where the divine love is named outright, and then settles back into thanks. There is no twist, no bridge that undermines the sentiment, no Morrison swerve into scat or sermon. Erik Hage’s observation that it was built on the framework of “Someone Like You” matters here: that earlier song had already solved the problem of how to make longing sound hymn-like, and the new song simply removes the longing and keeps the hymn. What remained was a chassis almost any competent singer could drive — a fact that would shortly be demonstrated on the largest possible scale.

Mercury clearly understood what it had, in its own cautious way. The label placed the song fourth on the album, immediately after the scene-setting “I’d Love to Write Another Song”, led the album campaign with it as a single, and then — after the single’s British failure — quietly tried again, recycling “Have I Told You Lately” as the B-side of the “Coney Island” single in January 1990, as if sheer persistence might find it the audience its reviews promised. It didn’t, not yet. But the label’s instinct was right, and Morrison’s was righter: he chose the song for The Best of Van Morrison in 1990, his first greatest-hits album, seating the new ballad among the monuments — an act of self-canonisation that told anyone paying attention exactly how he rated it. The compilation carried the song into hundreds of thousands of homes through the nineties, doing slowly and steadily the work the single had failed to do in a summer.

The Album Flew, the Single Fell

“Have I Told You Lately” was released as the album’s lead single on 5 June 1989, with another Avalon Sunset track, “Contacting My Angel”, on the B-side. The album it was selling became one of the biggest commercial successes of Morrison’s career — his fastest-selling record in the United Kingdom, certified gold there soon after release, and a number 13 album at home; it reached number 8 in the Netherlands, number 10 in Sweden and number 91 on the Billboard 200 in America, where it also went gold. At the end of 1989 Christgau placed it 22nd in the Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, and The Times would rank it 63rd in a 1993 list of the all-time top 100 albums. By any measure, Avalon Sunset restored Morrison as a mainstream commercial artist without asking him to renounce a single one of his obsessions.

The single, meanwhile, behaved like a song the British public had decided to admire at a distance. It peaked at number 74 on the UK singles chart — a startling figure for the lead single of a gold album, and one of the strangest chart lines in Morrison’s catalogue. In Ireland it climbed to number 12, in Italy its airplay reached number 9, and in Australia it stalled at number 93. Its one solid chart performance came in the market it seemed designed for: the United States, where it reached number 12 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary chart, the format of soft-rock radio stations whose listeners were beginning the process of adopting it for life’s ceremonies. The critical response in America was markedly warmer than the British one. Cash Box called the single “gorgeous” and “an instant classic” — a verdict that reads now like the most prescient review of Morrison’s career. Record Mirror, still smarting from the piano, wondered whether Van the Man had been taking sentimentality lessons from Stevie Wonder or had bumped into Richard Clayderman at the record company.

So the song ended its first commercial life in a curious limbo: universally praised, respectably played on American radio — and without a genuine hit version anywhere. It had the outline of a standard and the sales of an album track. What it needed was a messenger the mass audience already trusted with its feelings. Four years later, it got one.

Rod Stewart Takes It Around the World

Rod Stewart knew a standard when he heard one; his whole second career was being built on them. He first recorded “Have I Told You Lately” for his 1991 album Vagabond Heart, in a studio version that picked up modest adult contemporary airplay. Then, on 5 February 1993, he recorded his MTV Unplugged session at Universal in Los Angeles, seated, acoustic, in the format that was then reviving veteran careers across the industry. The live take of Morrison’s ballad became the emotional centre of the album Unplugged…and Seated, and when it was released as a single on 13 April 1993, the song’s second life began in earnest.

The numbers were everything Morrison’s original had not been. Stewart’s live version reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. It spent five weeks at number one on the American Adult Contemporary chart and reached number four on the mainstream top 40 airplay chart. It topped the singles chart in Canada. It was certified gold by the RIAA and sold some 700,000 copies in the United States, finishing 1993 among the country’s best-selling singles — number 32 on Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 and number five on the year-end adult contemporary list. On the Cash Box chart it climbed to number two. A song that Britain had let die at number 74 was suddenly, unmistakably, a standard — sung by a gravel-voiced Scotsman in an unplugged setting, exactly as its writer’s record company might have dreamed, except that the writer was not the singer.

It is worth being precise about which Stewart performance conquered the world, because the distinction carries the lesson of the whole story. The studio recording on Vagabond Heart — polished, professional, respectfully sung — had been available for two years and had gone almost nowhere as a single prospect. The Unplugged performance was the same singer and the same song in a different moral weather: seated rather than strutting, accompanied by acoustic instruments, visibly settling into the lyric rather than selling it. The early nineties unplugged format rewarded exactly the qualities Morrison’s original had — intimacy, restraint, the sense of a private utterance overheard — and Stewart, to his credit, recognised that the song could not be belted and did not try. He sang it the way Morrison had written it: as something said quietly to someone close. The audience that had ignored the song at number 74 in Britain and bought the album track in modest numbers now heard it, in that setting, as if for the first time. Nothing about the composition had changed. Everything about the presentation had. That is the sharpest of the battles behind this song: it demonstrated, expensively and in public, that the difference between a flop and a standard can be nothing more than the room you sing it in.

The battle here was not fought in public — there is no record of a feud, and Morrison, who does not give interviews about such things if he can avoid it, kept his counsel. It was fought in the public’s filing system. For a generation of listeners, “Have I Told You Lately” became a Rod Stewart song that Van Morrison had also recorded, an inversion of authorship that publishing royalties only partly console. Every copy of Stewart’s single carried Morrison’s name as songwriter, and the money flowed to Belfast; but the applause flowed to the man on the stage, and applause is the currency Morrison has always found hardest to share. The situation had a precedent in his own history, as the other article in this series about his work explores: he had been watching other people get famous on his material since “Gloria” was a garage-band rite of passage. The difference in 1993 was scale. This was not a cult cover. It was one of the biggest ballads in the world, and its composer was, to much of the audience, a footnote in small print.

There is a final irony in the aftermath. In the years that followed, Morrison reclaimed the song on his own terms — not by out-singing Stewart, which was never going to be the contest, but by re-rooting the song in the two traditions it had come from: the Celtic one and the church one.

The Grammy Came Home in Irish Company

Morrison had performed the song on film almost from the start — a performance filmed in 1989 anchors his video album Van Morrison: The Concert, released the following year — and he put a live performance of it on his 1994 album A Night in San Francisco, a document of his then-current stage show, all horns and Hammond and Georgie Fame. But the decisive reclamation came in 1995, when he recorded “Have I Told You Lately” with The Chieftains for their album The Long Black Veil, a record of collaborations between Ireland’s greatest traditional band and a parade of rock guests. Morrison and the Chieftains had history — Irish Heartbeat had been one of the warmest records of his career — and the arrangement they built around the song leaned into its Celtic bones, the folk-rock and Celtic colouring that had been there in the Avalon Sunset original under the strings. The same year produced another folk-tinged performance: on the Late Show with David Letterman, Morrison sang the song as a duet with Sinéad O’Connor, a pairing of Ireland’s two most famously uncompromising voices, later released on the Live on Letterman compilation album.

In February 1996, at the 38th Annual Grammy Awards, the Chieftains collaboration won the Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Consider what that means in the song’s ledger. The original had won no awards. Stewart’s blockbuster had made the song famous. And the industry’s highest honour for it went to a version sung by its author, in the company of Irish traditional musicians, in a folk arrangement that pointed back toward the prayer the song had started as. The Grammy cannot have erased the oddity of the song’s fame, but it re-stamped the title deed: whatever the wedding DJs and the unplugged audiences believed, the song’s definitive interpreters, per the Recording Academy, were Van Morrison and The Chieftains. The Chieftains version was itself issued as a single in Britain, where it peaked at number 71 — three places higher than the original had managed, a statistic so perfectly in keeping with the song’s British career that it reads like a joke the charts played on purpose.

The Wedding Industry Adopts a Prayer

If radio made the song famous, weddings made it permanent. “Have I Told You Lately” turned out to be engineered, as if by design, for the first dance: slow enough for two left feet, romantic without being explicit, spiritual enough for the grandparents, secular enough for everyone else, and structured around a question — have I told you lately? — that a wedding exists to answer in public. A poll of 1,300 British DJs placed Morrison’s original at number six on a list of the top ten first-dance wedding songs. The New York Daily News ranked it number 98 on its 2007 list of the 100 greatest love songs. Philadelphia’s WXPN, compiling its listeners’ “All Time 885 Greatest Songs” in 2004, placed it at number 261. Two castaways on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs — the impressionist Rory Bremner in 2003 and the broadcaster Gloria Hunniford in 2006 — chose it among the eight records they would take to the island. A song becomes a standard when people start using it to mark the moments of their own lives, and by every such measure, the adoption was total.

Hollywood followed the DJs. The song was featured in the 1996 romantic comedy One Fine Day, with George Clooney and Michelle Pfeiffer; in 2003 it played at the end of the Amanda Bynes film What a Girl Wants; and in 2014 it surfaced in 5 Flights Up, with Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton. Morrison’s own catalogue machinery kept it in view too — it was selected for the 2007 compilation Van Morrison at the Movies – Soundtrack Hits and for the remastered Still on Top – The Greatest Hits the same year. The covers, meanwhile, multiplied past counting: Kenny Rogers, Barbara Mandrell, Michael Ball, Della Reese, Engelbert Humperdinck, Andy Williams on his 2007 album I Don’t Remember Ever Growing Up, Barry Manilow on The Greatest Songs of the Eighties in 2008, an instrumental reading by Floyd Cramer, a country-charting version by Emilio Navaira in 1996, and a jazz reworking by Morrison himself in 2018, recorded with organist Joey DeFrancesco for the album You’re Driving Me Crazy, in which the song finally got to stretch out in the idiom its harmonies had always hinted at.

The most surreal afterlife belonged to Belgium. In 1999 the Flemish band Clouseau released a Dutch-language version, “Heb ik ooit gezegd”, translated by singer Koen Wauters with Yurek Onzia, as the lead single from the album In Stereo. It spent sixteen weeks on the Flemish chart, peaked at number seven, and was certified gold — Van Morrison’s prayer, thriving in translation, in a country where the English original had barely registered. And then there is the detail that stops every retelling of this song’s story short. On the morning of 11 September 2001, a Muzak version of “Have I Told You Lately” was playing at the Austin J. Tobin Plaza of the World Trade Center at around 7:50 a.m., roughly an hour before American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower. Nobody chose it for the occasion; that is the point. The song had become part of the world’s ambient furniture, the sound a public space makes when it wants to be gentle. It was present, unheard and unremarkable, at one of the century’s defining moments, precisely because it was already everywhere.

The Author Keeps His Counsel

Through all of this, the man who wrote the song said almost nothing about it — which is itself one of the battles, and the one he was always going to win. Morrison’s refusal to explain his work is legendary and total; he has spent decades treating interviews as an occupational hazard and interpretation as somebody else’s problem. Asked about the spiritual element in his music in a Time magazine question-and-answer session in 2009, he deflected with a sentence that could stand as the epigraph to his whole catalogue: “Religion is a kind of word game.” A songwriter capable of that shrug was never going to issue statements about whether his most famous ballad was addressed to God or to a woman, or how he felt about Rod Stewart’s version outselling his own by a factor of thousands. The prayer and the wedding song would have to coexist, unresolved, in the same four minutes, while the author counted the royalties and kept his peace.

There is a case that the silence was the strategy, whether he intended it or not. A song with an official meaning is a song with borders; “Have I Told You Lately”, unexplained, could be annexed by anyone — brides, mourners, radio programmers, Flemish pop bands, the Recording Academy — without ever asking permission or encountering resistance. Morrison’s cataloguing instincts did the quiet work instead: he placed the song on his first greatest-hits album, kept performing it, re-recorded it in Irish company and in jazz company, and let the composition, rather than the commentary, accumulate authority. Compare the fates of his other famous songs and the pattern sharpens. The records he fought over in public tended to stay fought over. The one he simply stood behind, silently, became the inescapable one — the song piped into plazas and played at first dances by people who could not have named its author under oath, which is either the ultimate defeat for a songwriter or the ultimate victory, and Morrison has never told us which he thinks it is. That, too, may be a kind of word game.

Four Million Plays, and Counting

The industry keeps its own score of such things, and in October 2007, at the BMI awards ceremony in London, Morrison received a Million-Air certificate marking more than four million radio performances of “Have I Told You Lately” in America alone. Four million plays is a figure that converts the song’s strange career into plain arithmetic: whatever the original single’s chart peak, the composition itself had become one of the most broadcast songs of its era, earning steadily in every format that touched it — Stewart’s hit, the Chieftains’ Grammy winner, the covers, the films, the weddings that no royalty statement will ever count. In the streaming era the original recording acquired the certifications its first release had been denied, going silver in the United Kingdom — 200,000 units — and platinum in New Zealand. And in 2021, thirty-two years after British buyers had let it stall at number 74, the song reached number one in Ireland — on the radio airplay chart, in the country its writer was born in, on the medium that had always loved it most.

That Irish number one deserves a moment of its own, because it explains the song’s whole geography of success. Ireland had been the original’s best market in 1989, when it reached number 12 there while Britain shrugged; Irish radio, raised on the same mixture of church and parlour ballad that Morrison grew up with in Belfast, never really let the song go. The Chieftains Grammy had re-consecrated it as Irish music; the Letterman duet with Sinéad O’Connor had re-staged it as an Irish duet; the wedding trade had made it a fixture of Irish receptions. When, in the streaming age, airplay data finally gave the old ballad a chart summit, it happened in the one place where the song had never been a footnote. Morrison, who left Belfast as a young man and has been arguing with it in song ever since, received his strangest chart honour from home — for a prayer he had written in England, in his forties, about a love he insisted was divine.

It is worth pausing on how completely this inverts the usual story of a hit. The normal arc runs from a big single to a fading catalogue item. “Have I Told You Lately” ran backwards: a commercially negligible single that behaved, over decades, like compound interest. The battles that defined it — prayer versus wedding song, framework versus originality, composer versus interpreter, flop versus standard — were not won in any single season. They were won by attrition, by a melody and a lyric so load-bearing that every new singer, DJ, film-maker and bride who leaned on them found they held.

Why It Endures

Strip the story back and the song’s durability is not mysterious. Morrison wrote a lyric that asks a question most people, in most long loves, are quietly afraid of the answer to — not “do I love you?” but “have I told you?” — and set it to a melody built from his own earlier work and a soul record he had loved since he was young. He then framed the answer in terms large enough to hold a marriage and a faith at once. Songs that specific about gratitude, and that unspecific about everything else, do not date. They wait.

What endures, too, is the lesson of its battles. “Have I Told You Lately” survived being undersold by its own label’s market, being out-sung in the public imagination by a friendlier voice, and being translated, orchestrated, unplugged and Muzaked — and it came through all of it with its authorship finally, formally, Grammy-stamped and its royalties flowing to the man who wrote it as a prayer in the first place. Van Morrison spent much of his career fighting the music business over control of his work, and mostly fighting it to a draw. This song is the rare case where time itself fought on his side. He asked, in 1989, whether he had told you lately. The world has been answering ever since — at weddings, on islands real and imagined, in Irish radio studios and Belgian hit parades — and it has never once answered no.