“Oh the Warm Feeling” (1986) – Van Morrison * Written and produced by Van Morrison * LP: No Guru, No Method, No Teacher * Label: Mercury
Van Morrison took the title for his No Guru, No Method, No Teacher album from a passage in the 1964 book Think on These Things by Jiddu Krishnamurti, and the songs reflect that anti-guru guru’s focus on self-knowledge as true religion. Inner peace and societal change, he teaches, both come through self-directed meditation, and you can hear Morrison express this, especially, on the album’s “Got to Go Back,” “Oh the Warm Feeling,” and “In the Garden.” Recorded in Sausalito, it was New Agey in sentiment and sound, sharing the Marin County textures of late-eighties Windham Hill releases. But even if you’ve been programmed to reject such characteristics, you’d have to be truly hard-hearted not to feel the genuine spirituality in those three songs, at least. “Oh the Warm Feeling” gets the spotlight here for espousing peaceful seaside pondering, filling Morrison with “devotion” and “religion” and, presumably, peace, while Richie Buckley’s soprano sax handles aforementioned aural textures. But the first four notes of the song seem to mimic the first four notes in the main riff of the Damned’s “Noise Noise Noise” (1979) which, if intentional, is quite the emphasis-through-counterpoint exercise.