Imagine by John Lennon

Imagine, John Lennon's second solo album, came out on Apple Records on 9 September 1971, and where John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was stark and bare-boned, this one is lush, lavish and built to reach the back of the room. Lennon produced it with his wife Yoko Ono and Phil Spector, recording from early to mid-1971 at his own Ascot Sound Studios, at EMI's studios and at the Record Plant in New York.

The session crew is a who's who: George Harrison, his old Beatles bandmate, Nicky Hopkins on keyboards, Klaus Voormann on bass, and Alan White and Jim Keltner taking turns on drums. The title track opens the album, a gentle hymn that has become his signature song, and "Jealous Guy" is a bruised, tender ballad. Elsewhere the lyrics cover peace, love and politics and carry traces of his primal scream therapy, and "How Do You Sleep?" is a full-on broadside at Paul McCartney after a stretch of bad blood between the two.

Cameras rolled through the sessions for a documentary that was shelved; some of the footage surfaced in Imagine: John Lennon in 1988 and more in John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky in 2018. The album went to number one in both Britain and America, and it's rated alongside Plastic Ono Band as the best of his solo work. In 2018 it was expanded into The Ultimate Collection, a six-disc box full of demos, outtakes and surround mixes.

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