12. Avalon Sunset (1989)
If you ask me, Morrison's best song is not "Gloria" or "Brown-Eyed Girl" or "Moondance" or anything off Astral Weeks; it's "Orangefield," a blip of a single released a good decade after his classic period. With a sweeping orchestra working in perfect cahoots with one jangley guitar, it tells of one long-remembered sunny afternoon, and it's Morrison doing only what Morrison can do: searing his own lucid memories into the mind of a listener through sublime force of will. The rest of Avalon Sunset is typical '80s Morrison, except for "Have I Told You Lately?," an unexpected rush for Barry Manilow territory. I hate it. Wedding DJs love it.

11. No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986)
We're lucky no church ever snagged Morrison for long. No proselytizer would never be able to utilize the Book of Genesis with as much ease and beauty as Morrison does in "In the Garden." His most overtly spiritual album is deeply felt and sturdily written.

10. Blowin' Your Mind (1967)
Morrison's debut contains his most palpable hit, the ubiquitous "Brown-Eyed Girl," but "T.B. Sheets," a nine-minute dispatch from a lover's sickbed (which also happens to be a killer blues guitar workout) showed he was already aiming for something more lofty than pop gold. The rest fits into his short-lived group Them's excellent proto-garage sound.

9. Down the Road (2002)
Just when some cigar-breathed record executive was probably trying to get him to do a Supernatural-style monstrosity with guest appearances by Nelly Furtado and Moby, Morrison dropped this superb disc, the best from his easygoing nostalgia period. Down the Road includes a handful of songs, including "Hey Mr. DJ" and "Meet Me in the Indian Summer," that count as some of the best straightforward soul-rock he has ever recorded.

8. Beautiful Vision (1982)
Morrison and George Harrison are the only songwriters to make stirring music out of vague, pantheistic concepts of God. This aspect of his work is central to Beautiful Vision. "Dweller on the Threshold" and "Aryan Mist" are two of his most sublime songs, while "Cleaning Windows" (really about cleaning windows) and "Vanlose Staircase" (a tribute to an actual staircase) find the transcendental in everyday life.

7. The Healing Game (1997)
After a few unambitious efforts, the pilgrim-poet in Morrison briefly roared back to life here. Everything about The Healing Game is meaty, from the swinging saxophones and bellowing backup singers to the deep human sentiment of "Sometimes We Cry" to nearly apocalyptic visions of "Rough God Goes Riding" and "The Burning Ground" (which Morrison delivers with assertiveness). Yes, the older Morrison is stylistically unadventurous. But The Healing Game shows the power of substance over style.

6. Saint Dominic's Preview (1972)
Though opened by the irresistibly bouncy single "Jackie Wilson Said," Saint Dominic's Preview was Morrison's first attempt at a new Astral Weeks and the closest he ever came to achieving it. He stumbles a bit on the two ten-minute-plus numbers, but it's great to hear him once again so taken by the powers of his raw consciousness and the mechanics of his acoustic guitar. On the title track, a cityscape painted in lyrical hues borrowed from Blonde on Blonde, everyone in the band really works for their paycheck.

5. Into the Music (1979)
As a bandleader, Morrison has a knack for making dozen-person groups sound like one well-trained beast with twenty-four arms. There's no better example than Into the Music. That's Ry Cooder on "Full Force Gale," but you'd never know a flashy slide guitarist was on board, since the track is so overall thick and energetic. The second half features some of Morrison's most dizzying displays as a vocalist.

4. Veedon Fleece (1974)
After Morrison and his first wife divorced, he (of course) holed up and wrote a wounded-sounding album of catharsis. Also in accordance with rock cliché, that album turned out to be one of the best, most emotionally charged entries in his catalogue. Just like Blood on the Tracks or Rumours, Veedon Fleece is as filled with mixed, sometimes contradictory emotions. Morrison bubbles over with residual warmth in "Bulbs," but croons through his loneliness on "Who Was That Masked Man?" The best track is "Streets of Arklow," which turns his obsession with getting lost in his surroundings into a soul-kicking feeling of autonomy, driven home by a forlorn recorder.

3. Tupelo Honey (1971)
With Tupelo Honey, Morrison proved he could sing American rhythm and blues better than most actual Americans, be it on a song as gentle as "Old Woodstock" or as frenzied as "Moonshine Whisky." "Wild Night," an ode to the power of rhythm itself, is one of his crown jewels, and if there's any part of your emotional makeup that can be moved by a love-struck pop song, the title track (in which he literally sings about something sappy) should do the trick. There's a emotional undercurrent to every song on Tupelo Honey, which puts it ahead of the albums on which Morrison merely showed a black-belt mastery of this sound.

2. Moondance (1970)
"We were born before the wind / Also younger than the sun," Morrison croons in the opening of his seminal "Into the Mystic." From the lunar fever of the title track to the summer rain recalled in "And It Stoned Me," Moondance is full of references to the power of nature. The album itself seems like an elemental force, a whirlwind of jazzy saxophones, soulful vocals, and acoustic guitars purring like cicadas. The above-mentioned songs are standouts, but for thirty-eight minutes and fourteen seconds, Moondance doesn't miss a single beat, showing twenty-five-year-old Morrison as the master of a vast domain of modernized Celtic folk and Anglicized jazz and R&B.

1. Astral Weeks (1968)
Kept out of the studio for months due to a dispute with his former label, Morrison had a backlog of great material, when he finally scored three sessions with some jazz session musicians in New York City in the fall of 1968. The eight free-flowing tracks of Astral Weeks bear no marks of era or genre. The lyrics effortlessly move between memory, thought, and passion, but most importantly, you can feel them. When Morrison sings of "the slipstream between the viaducts of your dream where immobile steel rims crack," he doesn't sound like a poetry student trying to wow a professor, but a man lost on some psychic plane, trying to navigate his way home. There are a lot of descriptive details on Astral Weeks, and it wouldn't fully articulate their effect to say Morrison made Cypress Avenue seem like a real place or Madame George like a real person. He did one better and made them both seem like they forever exist in some dream state accessible only through listening to a record. If Dylan hadn't already, Astral Weeks proved rock could be as literary as beatnik poetry, because only rock and roll could light words on fire the way Morrison did here.