Biographer Brian Hinton calls it the central song in the album and 'perhaps in Morrison's whole career. "It starts just like 'Cyprus Avenue', no coincidence as the line about 'songs from way back when' hints, and with a walk down the avenue (of dreams), to the sound of a haunted violin. A song of full, blazing sex as well as revelation. The healing here is like that in Arthurian myth, the wounded King restored through the action of the Holy Grail, but it is also through as graphic a seduction, almost, as the original live version of "Gloria"'.[1]
Author Clinton Heylin concludes that "what makes the song, and indeed Into the Music work is its self-awareness. Gone is the awkward self-consciousness...It is replaced by a newly assured tone, born of a genuine awareness of what he (Morrison) was attempting."[2]