Some of Van Morrison’s best work in the 2000s had been covers, especially on his country album Pay the Devil, while his 2010s work would see him revisiting certain tracks from his catalogue over and over again, splitting the distinction between studio and live releases. Duets therefore stands as a bit of a crossroads album, making it clear that the renewed energy of Born to Sing: No Plan B was far from a fluke but also ushering in a more classicist and less ambitious, if equally cheeky and playful Van, for this new decade.

On the face of it Duets might also seem, like Keep it Simple, like an epilogue to Van’s career. Yet true to the title, this is a genuine reworking, not just of individual songs but of Van’s canon and legacy. There are so many deep cuts here that it almost functions as an eccentric and provocative Best Of collection – or an anti-Best Of, even as it seems to be canonising and commemorating him. Many of the tracks are taken from the late 90s onwards, turning Duets into a case for these as new classics in Van’s oeuvre. At times it reminded me of Paul Simon’s 2018 album In the Blue Light, which saw him revisiting underrated tracks from his catalogue, with a particular focus on 2000’s You’re the One.

Some of the best moments on the album comes from these acts of reimagination. “These Are the Days” and “Get On with The Show” form such emphatic closers on Avalon Sunset and What’s Wrong With This Picture? but now they occur in the middle of the album. Likewise, “Real Real Gone,” the dramatic opener to Enlightenment, is now the penultimate track. Again, these shifts in position ask us to revise our sense of where the beginning and (especially) the ending of Van’s career should be situated, and caution us against treating any one album as a coda.

All that said, Duets does get a little bland and samey at times, especially at seventy-six minutes While Van improves some songs, and draws others into focus, he detracts from a fair few too. This is especially clear in the way he pivots away from the mysticism of his 80s and early 90s work. I have a real soft spot for this period, so it was a bit of a shame to hear such jaunty versions of “These Are the Days” and “Higher Than the World,” my favourite of all Van’s songs (and another incredible album opener that is repurposed and repositioned here).

Then again, that urgency does re-emerge on other tracks. Two of the biggest highlights “Rough God Goes Writing” and “Fire in the Belly,” make a case for The Healing Game as a central album in Van’s late work, and both shed some of the loungey sheen of Duets for a more compelling sense of vision. Van also revisits “Streets of Arklow” and, this time around, brokers its bleak naturalism into a more emergent sense of wonder, recalling “The Street Only Knew Your Name,” another track from Inarticulate Speech of the Heart.

However, the core highlight of Duets is its cover of “Real Real Gone.” This is also one of my favourite Van tracks, thanks to the way it splits his visionary, melodic and propulsive qualities so brilliantly. It’s such an infectious and joyous song that it really works to have two singers sharing it, and Michael Buble is perhaps the best of all the collaborators here in getting into Van’s groove, especially when the two elasticise in the long outro to the song, when Van is riffing on all the formative artists of his childhood.

For all that Duets’ overall movement is away from mystic vision, this cover also opened up the wonder of “Real Real Gone” in a new way for me too. With all that newfound elasticity, and with Buble taking on some of the burden of the vocals, Van is freed up to return to the underlying mythos of his career: sitting at the window in Belfast as a teenager, listening to the radio beaming in from America and Europe, and contemplating the vast swathes of musical space in between. I’d never thought of “Real Real Gone” as being a part of this recurring image in Van’s work, but this cover made me wonderfully aware of it.