“Love” by John Lennon

"Love" is the gentle one on John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, Lennon's first solo album, released at the end of 1970: a song he wrote alone and sings over his own guitar, with Phil Spector on piano, and its mood is sunnier than most of what surrounds it. Lennon, Yoko Ono and Spector produced it, with John Leckie engineering and Richard Lush and Andy Stevens recording.

Lennon thought about making it a single, then went with "Mother" instead, but plenty of stations that balked at "Mother" played "Love" anyway. It finally went out as a single in 1982, a promotional tie-in for The John Lennon Collection, in a remix that brings Spector's piano intro and outro up level with the rest of the song, where on the album they start in a hush and swell.

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