Songfacts®:

• "Fame Will Eat the Soul" is a raw-sounding call-and-response duet with The Righteous Brothers' Bill Medley. The oldest track on Three Chords & the Truth, Morrison didn't like the arrangement of the original demo, so he held onto it before re-recording the tune to his satisfaction.
• The notoriously grumpy Van Morrison has largely shunned the limelight throughout his career: His relationship with fame ranges from hatred to indifference.
  
  Drank some darkness, didn't you?
  Against the light within you
  
  Uncut magazine asked Morrison if this lyric is how fame feels to him. He replied: "At times. But not all the time. Sure, I have felt that at times. That's the oldest song on the record. It was written a while ago. I felt like that, but it comes and goes and you have to deal with it, and you have various degrees of it. But really, it's just about getting this stuff out. You could say that writing songs is therapy - which it is."