The one solo album John Lennon called his greatest work: “Those songs stand up to any Beatles song”
By the end of the 1960s, no one wanted to forget about The Beatles more than John Lennon.
He had been talking about leaving the group for years at that point, and even if Paul McCartney was the first person to announce to the world that the band was done, Lennon wasn’t about to sit around and wait while the rest of his bandmates tended to their solo careers. He wanted the opportunity to make something great, and while he was used to taking his time, every one of his albums was another adventure whenever he picked it up.
Because while Lennon wasn’t necessarily the best musician in the band throughout their run, he was always able to express himself the best. Ever since getting introspective back on Rubber Soul, Lennon wasn’t going to settle for mindless love songs anymore. He had the ability to make something new every single time that he picked up his guitar, and even if he didn’t particularly care for a lot of what the Fab Four had done after they broke up, he could still feel proud about tunes like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ after the fact.
If he was going to make a real statement after their breakup, he needed to go outside of the experimental field a bit more. Lennon clearly had a lot on his mind after losing his writing partner, and while Plastic Ono Band wasn’t the most polished album of all time when people heard it, it was certainly the most emotional thing that Lennon could have offered up around that time.
Everyone knows that Lennon could get more than a little bit vitriolic when he had something to say about his enemies, but a lot of this record is more about processing his emotions. He had been through therapy in the months leading up to him writing these songs, and with only Ringo Starr and Klaus Voorman helping him through the whole process, every song seems like a different window into his life, whether it was him commenting on class struggle or dissecting his relationship with Yoko Ono.
The rest of the world wasn’t nearly ready for an album that was this raw, but even in the months before his death, Lennon felt that it was just as good as nearly anything that he had done with his old band, saying, “’Love’ and those Plastic Ono Band songs stand up to any song that was written when I was a Beatle. Now, it may take you 20 or 30 years to appreciate that, but the fact is, if you check those songs out, you will see that it is as good as any fucking stuff that was ever done.”
And that also extended to what he would do on the song ‘Imagine’. Even though the public’s opinion on the song has fluctuated over the years, the fact that it has become an anthem for peace is really what Lennon was trying to get at all his life. He was never trying to preach from a pulpit whenever he made these kinds of songs. He’s only asking his audience to imagine a world where all of these things seemed possible.
However, the debut is a lot more rewarding because of how well he is able to talk about his struggles. Anyone else would have resented Lennon for writing a song that put the final nail in the coffin for The Beatles on ‘God’, but after ridding himself of all of the massive figures in his life throughout the song, him saying that he only believes in himself feels much more earned after going through every other track.
Lennon was a much different person than he was when he started The Beatles back in the day, but just because he was older didn’t mean that he didn’t still have something to say. He had a lot more wisdom to impart, and the rest of the world was more than willing to listen every single time he picked up a guitar.
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