John Lennon
John Lennon's songs cut through styles and decades with plainspoken hooks and melodies that refuse to age. From Beatles classics to the solo anthem Imagine, his writing keeps finding new voices in jazz rooms, a cappella circles and the concert hall.
Whether pared to a single voice and guitar or dressed in close harmony, the songs carry a directness that still lands. Early Beatles numbers, many written with Paul McCartney, move with bounce and bite; later writing opens into ballads of loss, longing and hard-won calm. Imagine remains a spare plea for a better world, while Eleanor Rigby, Norwegian Wood, Yesterday, Blackbird and For No One hold their melancholy even when the arrangement shifts. The craft is in the tune you cannot shake and the lyric that says exactly enough.
Compositions by John Lennon appear on
Lest We Forget: A Manifest of Struggle and Hope
Welcome to the world’s first “classical” protest CD. The music ranges widely across Germany, France, England, Austria, Poland, Chile, the USA and Australia, touching world wars, the Holocaust, dictatorships and the stolen generation. It is a no-holds-barred plea for humanity to recover humanitarian values before it is too late.