Madame George

Bruce Springsteen has described hearing Astral Weeks for the first time as a transformative experience — the moment he understood what popular music could aspire to be. He’s not alone. Astral Weeks arrived in 1968 as an album with no commercial logic, no concessions to the radio formats of its era, no singles, and no follow-through on any of the expectations that Van Morrison’s earlier work had established. It was a complete reinvention, and “Madame George” is its heart.

The song is a stream-of-consciousness meditation on a specific character from Morrison’s Belfast childhood — a transvestite or drag performer, depending on the interpretation, who lived in a declining neighborhood and who Morrison observed with the particular attention of a child who senses something important is happening without fully understanding what. The writing moves between specific detail and emotional impressionism with the confidence of someone who trusts the listener to meet them in the gap.

Astral Weeks was recorded in two sessions in New York with jazz musicians who had never heard the songs before — Morrison ran through them once, the band played, the tape ran. The spontaneity is audible throughout, but nowhere more than in “Madame George,” where Richard Davis’s double bass and Jay Berliner’s acoustic guitar orbit Morrison’s voice with the loose precision of musicians who are genuinely following someone they cannot predict.

“And you know you gotta go / On that train from Dublin / And you know how it feels / To say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

The long coda — Morrison repeating “goodbye” over and over as the arrangement circles and descends — is one of the most devastating endings in popular music. It is not sad in a simple way. It is sad in the way that an entire period of your life can be sad in retrospect: sweetly, permanently, with the full understanding that you cannot return.

No album has produced more passionate defenders per unit of mainstream exposure than Astral Weeks. “Madame George” is the reason.