Music like The Healing

The Healing Game is the twenty-sixth studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was released in 1997 by Polydor.

The 2008 remastered version of the album contains a bonus track: "At the End of the Day", which was the a B-side of "Rough God Goes Riding", the third single of the album. "Rough God Goes Riding" was listed as one of the standout tracks from Van Morrison's six album reissue series.

The album was reissued again in 2019 with bonus material from the studio sessions and Van Morrison's performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival on 17 July 1997.

The album was recorded in Dublin, Ireland, in 1996. The cover shows Morrison with Haji Ahkba.

The title song "The Healing Game" is about the tradition of Belfast street singing. Van Morrison in Q magazine said, "People find it incredible when I tell them that people used to sing and play music in the street. I think there's a whole oral tradition that's disappeared." The song, "Rough God Goes Riding" is taken from a W. B. Yeats poem "The Second Coming" with its figure from the Apocalypse "rough beast". Leo Green's saxophone follows Morrison's voice like a twin brother. In "Waiting Game" he is "the brother of the snake" which Brian Hinton says refers to both his lost friend Jim Morrison (known for writing about "The Lizard King"), and the Garden of Eden. "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" follows the children's book, The Wind in the Willows closely and Paddy Moloney plays uillean pipes with Phil Coulter on piano. On "Burning Ground" the singer relives a common scene from his childhood when jute was shipped to Belfast from India.