Obviously, Van Morrison’s Moondance is one of the very greatest albums of the classic rock era. The long-player’s beatific meditation on the mind-blowing beauty of nature, spirituality and love makes it something that people have a very personal relationship with, and associate with a time, or a place, or both, in their lives when they were first exposed to the album. (The first time I heard Moondance was floating down a creek on an inflated inner tube in West Virginia as the sun was rising. I had dropped a bunch of blotter acid with some teenage friends and one of them had a battery-powered jam box with “It Stoned Me” queued up and timed for just the right golden moment to come through the trees before hitting play and giving us exactly the sort of epiphany (“Oh the water, oh the water…”) Morrison wanted his listeners to have. We’d been playing stuff like Nina Hagen, Killing Joke and PiL all night, so this was an immediate show stopper for our post-punk primed ears. It was an… auspicious introduction to his music and I’ve been a Van Morrison fan ever since.)

It’s useful to consider Moondance as a perfect work of art. It’s unassailable. In the classic rock canon. Beyond anyone’s opinion. One for the ages. And as I was saying above, you can project a lot onto it emotionally (like you can with, say, Blood on the Tracks), so it’s very dear to a lot of people’s hearts. I think of Moondance like Leaves of Grass, except that Walt Whitman went about refining his transcendental masterpiece, literally, for four decades (up to the time he was on his deathbed) while Morrison laid his down in a matter of days when he was just 24 years old and left it to be mixed by someone else.

I’ve read that Van Morrison was pissed off to find that Warner Brothers Records were planning to release a box set of a newly remastered Moondance with outtakes from the 1970 sessions (including a 5.1 HD DTS surround mix of the album on Blu-ray) and had denounced it on his website before removing the post. Morrison apparently feels that he’s given the world a great work of art and he’d like to keep its integrity intact. Who could blame him?

He needn’t have worried. My own Moondance “phase” happened decades ago. I’ve always loved it, but admittedly I hadn’t played the album for well over a decade. When I got this box set—and it’s fantastic when this happens, when you have a new entry point reviving interest in something you used to listen to a lot—I couldn’t stop playing it. I played it on repeat for for days on end (to the point of divorce threats!) The 5.1 mix, done by one of the recordings original engineers, Elliot Scheiner, is simply magnificent and to hear this music envelope you and swirl around you is a sort of musical paradise for audiophile rock snob like yours truly. It was almost like hearing Moondance for the first time. Every fan of this album should hear it this way.

Worth pointing out that WEA did right by Moondance on a technical level—unlike with many label’s 5.1 releases, they went with the far superior HD DTS option on a Blu-ray disc instead of a regular DVD with lossy surround. (As someone who is genuinely motivated to actually spend money on physical releases of 5.1 products, the Blu-ray vs. DVD issue is how I weigh if I am going to plunk down the cash or not. The difference is profound, making the Moondance Deluxe Edition a good value for the money, whereas I’d rate The Band’s new Live at the Academy Of Music 1971 box—with just a lossy DVD—as a “pass.”)

Below, Van Morrison & The Caledonia Soul Orchestra perform “Moondance” live at the Rainbow Theatre in London, 1973: