Almost everything on Astral Weeks looks backwards. Van Morrison’s 1968 masterpiece is a song cycle of memory and loss — childhood streets, doomed lovers, a young man already old in regret. One song breaks the pattern. Sweet Thing, the third track on the album’s first side, In the Beginning, is the only song in the sequence that faces the future: a love song of pure anticipation, all gardens and rain and ferry boats, sung by a man promising that he will never grow “so old again.” It lasts four minutes and twenty-two seconds, it was never released as a single, and it has quietly become one of the most cherished recordings Morrison ever made — described by one Guardian critic, in all seriousness, as “the most perfect song of all time.”
The Last Session
Sweet Thing was recorded on 15 October 1968, at Century Sound Studios in New York, during the third and final session for Astral Weeks. The circumstances of those sessions have passed into legend. Morrison arrived at Warner Bros. Records after a miserable year: his American breakthrough, Brown Eyed Girl, had left him enmeshed in a punitive contract with the late Bert Berns’s Bang Records, and he had spent months in professional and financial limbo around Boston, playing small clubs. Warner Bros. gave him three sessions and a producer, Lewis Merenstein, who made the decisive creative call of Morrison’s career: instead of rock session men, he would hire jazz musicians.
Merenstein turned to bassist Richard Davis — then among the most respected double bassists in jazz, a veteran of Sarah Vaughan’s band and of Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! — and asked him to assemble a group. Davis later recalled: “He asked me if I could get a group together to record with this guy coming from Ireland. I got Connie Kay, who I always called the ‘Security Officer’ because he gave me that secure feeling when he played. Jay Berliner was on guitar and Warren Smith on vibes.” Davis functioned as the sessions’ de facto musical director, leading an improvisational ensemble through songs the musicians had barely heard, often in one or two takes. Merenstein called Davis “the soul of the album,” and Greil Marcus wrote that Davis “provided the greatest bass ever heard on a rock album.”
On Sweet Thing the line-up was Morrison on vocal and acoustic guitar, Davis on double bass, Jay Berliner on classical guitar, Connie Kay on drums, John Payne on flute, and Warren Smith Jr. — remarkably — on triangle, with Larry Fallon’s string arrangement floating over the top. The track hums along on the levity in Morrison’s delivery: he jumps hedges, watches ferry boats, strolls with his lover “in gardens all wet with rain,” and dissolves into the repeated incantation of “my, my, my, my, my sweet thing.”
Davis deserves a paragraph of his own, because Sweet Thing is unthinkable without him. This was a musician who had played with Stravinsky, Bernstein and Boulez, who anchored Eric Dolphy’s avant-garde landmark Out to Lunch! and Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, and who would be voted best jazz bassist in DownBeat‘s critics’ poll year after year from the late sixties into the seventies. On the Morrison sessions, by the account in Bass Magazine, Davis “brought his jazz sensibility to the date, and turned some of the singer’s simple folk tunes into freewheeling jazz jams,” playing freely around the beat while Kay — his “Security Officer” — kept the ground steady beneath him. You can hear exactly that division of labour in Sweet Thing: Kay’s drums mark a gentle, unhurried pulse while Davis’s bass wanders, comments and sings underneath Morrison’s vocal, a second voice in the love song. It is the sound of a folk singer being carried, very carefully, by jazzmen who understood that the worst thing they could do was pin him down.
The sessions were famously loose. The musicians were given little more than sketches of the songs, Morrison resisted explaining what he wanted in any detail, and much of Astral Weeks was captured in first or second takes, with the band listening to the singer rather than to any chart. Sweet Thing, cut at the last of the three sessions, benefits from three weeks of accumulated instinct: by 15 October the players knew how Morrison breathed, and the track has an ease the earlier recordings were still reaching for. Berliner’s classical guitar — nylon strings, a Spanish softness — is the other signature sound, answering Payne’s flute phrase for phrase while Smith’s triangle glints at the edges like light on wet leaves.
Morrison himself offered the plainest possible account of it to biographer Ritchie Yorke: “Sweet Thing is another romantic song. It contemplates gardens and things like that… wet with rain. It’s a romantic love ballad not about anybody in particular but about a feeling.”
Its placement on the album is part of its meaning. Sweet Thing sits third in the running order, between Beside You — a song of separation, sung to a lover already receding — and Cyprus Avenue, the great fever-dream of adolescent longing for an unattainable girl. Between those two poles of loss and yearning, Sweet Thing is the moment of arrival: the love is present, reciprocated, and walked with in the rain. Critics have long noted that it is the album’s only song that looks forward rather than back, and in a sequence preoccupied with childhood streets and vanished innocence, its simple futurity — the promise to walk and talk “in gardens all wet with rain” for years to come — lands like sunlight breaking through the record’s prevailing weather.
A Slice of Mystery
Astral Weeks sold poorly on release in November 1968, and Sweet Thing had to wait for the album’s slow canonisation. Writing in The Words and Music of Van Morrison, Erik Hage called it “one of the most beautiful and euphoric songs in the Morrison catalogue,” noting how Morrison turns to the natural landscape as “an external reflection of the internal pulse of love,” in kinship with English romantic poetry. AllMusic’s William Ruhlmann called the song “effervescent” and a “musical meditation,” a pool of light amid the album’s sombre mood. The New York Times, surveying Morrison’s work in 1992, reached for stranger language: “nothing less than a slice of mystery: rhythms like the angular slant of rain, violins arching like branches, the strange flight of a flute and a voice hushed with sadness… transparent, as incorporeal as time or light.”
The Song That Outlasted the Album’s Odds
The surest measure of Sweet Thing‘s standing came in 1990, when Morrison compiled The Best of Van Morrison, his first greatest hits collection. Of all the songs on Astral Weeks, Sweet Thing was the only one he chose to include — the single emissary of his most famous album on the record that introduced him to a new generation of CD buyers. By then the album itself had completed one of pop’s great reputational reversals: the record that barely sold in 1968 would be placed at No. 19 on Rolling Stone‘s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. He returned to the song in 2009 on Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl, recorded to mark forty years since the album’s release, when the song’s promise of renewal had acquired the poignancy of a sixty-three-year-old singing his twenty-three-year-old self’s vow.
There is a footnote that ties the song’s story neatly together. The bassist who shaped it, Richard Davis, went on to play on Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run — including its elegiac Meeting Across the River — meaning that the same pair of hands underpins two of the most romanticised albums of the rock era, made seven years and several musical worlds apart. Davis died in September 2023, aged ninety-three, a professor emeritus and an NEA Jazz Master; the obituaries, almost without exception, reached for Astral Weeks and for the Sweet Thing session as the moment a jazz musician wandered into a folk singer’s studio date and changed what a rock record could be.
The streaming era has been kind to it. In New Zealand the song has earned a Gold certification, representing 15,000 units on the strength of sales and streams — a chart afterlife its composer could hardly have imagined for an album track cut in a day in 1968. And in January 2023, the Australian singer-songwriter Mark Seymour made the case in The Guardian that Sweet Thing is, quite simply, “the most perfect song of all time.”
Perfection is a large claim for a song built from a handful of images and a repeated endearment. But Sweet Thing earns its reputation the way the whole of Astral Weeks does: by sounding less composed than overheard, a feeling caught before it could be tidied into shape. On an album where a young man kept turning to look at what he had lost, this was the moment he looked ahead instead — and found, walking towards him through the wet garden, the rest of his life.