that I'm ... sorry?

To whom is this apology directed?

To the lad who WROTE a song with the same title as this post, Van Morrison.

I always like to say that the ears don't lie. If you like a song, you like it. If you're embarrassed to admit it, you're just weak. We are all guilty of guilty pleasures.

Van Morrison, though, is one of those artists that it was "cool" to like. I always rated him as overrated. It wasn't that my ears betrayed me. Some songs - namely "Domino" and "Crazy Love" - were as good as it got for setting a mood or changing a vibe.

It wasn't always that way. Up until the last decade, Van Morrison was in my second tier of favorite artists.

My vast cassette tape collection of yore had its share of Van Morrison efforts, including the universally lauded "Astral Weeks" album, but the record label did the Irishman a great disservice on the tapes by including no other information other than a cover with a picture.

That set me up for making an assumption that could now leave me wide open to a defamtion of character lawsuit.

One day, at The Times Herald, we took a break from rapping about sports to talk about music and I explained how I deduct points for artists who make a regular practice of performing songs written by others.

I really shouldn't. As an aspiring songwriter with a tone-deaf singing voice, I should be grateful such performers are still out there, but I'm a weird dude who makes no sense sometimes.

Someone - and I don't remember who, although I have some suspicions - asked why I like Van Morrison, as if they had me check-mated, and I swallowed hard.

"Why?" I asked. "He doesn't write his own stuff?"

Two or three people in the room concurred that he did not and I did no supporting research on it and pushed Van Morrison almost out of my Top 100 list as a result. I went about five years without even listening to his music and never upgraded his music from tape to disc.

Feeling humbled by not knowing a piece of vital information about a classic rocker, I took it out on Van Morrison by practically banning his music in Gordonville.

Regrettably, I had but two of his songs amongst the close to 6,000 stored on my iPOD (i.e. radio station WGORD). That's less than Journey. Less than Hootie & The Blowfish.

The other day, my wife and I were at Target - part of the same shopping spree in which I witnessed the shopping-cart horror mentioned in a previous post ("Just a song before I go") - and I wandered away from the better half while pushing Princess Sofia around in her stroller.

Invariably, Sofia ordered me to the music section of the store and I saw a Van Morrison "best of" selection for only $9.99. Although it was missing the brilliant song "Ivory Tower," I was pleased with the song selection. While I sullied my hands by also grabbing some Barry Manilow schlock - "sings songs of the 1970s" or some such tripe - for my mother, I held onto the Van Morrison disc.

It's part of my process, you see. I'll do that if I'm thinking about buying something. I'll hold it for a while and then see how I feel about when the moment of truth - the cashier line - comes (I don't believe in returns unless something is non-functional).

When my wife said she would just pay for everything, I slipped the Van Morrison disc into her cart and hoped she wouldn't notice. She did, but she paid for it anyway.

I took it home and opened it (no easy task for an oldhead in 2007) to find actual details about the songs -starting with two hits from his first band, Them, through to more recent releases - and I was struck with information that made me wanna break down and cry.

Van Morrison wrote, or co-wrote, just about everything.

All these years, I had taken the word of someone else as gospel and deprived myself of good music as a result.

Someone handed me misinformation and I ran with it, arrogantly, without searching for the truth.

It made me feel dirty, like someone who voted the wrong way in the 2004 presidential election based on flimsy terror alerts.

Moreover, I've sullied the good name of Van Morrison by including him whenever I acted like a know-it-all and mentioned artists - like Rod Stewart, for example - who I believe are too highly regarded for not writing their own material.

All I can do now is right a wrong.

It's going to be all Van Morrison all the time - at least for a week or so. This disc has been inserted in the leadoff spot in the six-disc changer in my gas-guzzling SUV.

It's not going to be much of a sacrifice.

The music sounds good.

And the ears don't lie.