Double Fantasy by John Lennon

Double Fantasy came out on Geffen in November 1980 and marked John Lennon's return to full-time recording after a five-year break spent raising his son Sean. He and Yoko Ono cut it at the Hit Factory in New York between August and October 1980, and the record swaps back and forth between the two of them, song for song, like a conversation across the kitchen table. It's warm, grown-up soft rock, and the songs rock radio keeps going back to are "(Just Like) Starting Over", "Woman", "Watching the Wheels", "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)" and "Clean Up Time".

It stumbled at first, and plenty of critics sneered at its starry-eyed picture of the couple's marriage. Then, three weeks after its release, Lennon was shot and killed, and the album became a worldwide success and won the 1981 Grammy for Album of the Year. Time has been kinder since, especially to his songs, and in 2010 Ono released a pared-back remix, Double Fantasy Stripped Down.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.