“Mother” by John Lennon

"Mother" opens John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, the raw-nerve album Lennon released in December 1970, and before he sings a note a funeral bell tolls slowly, four times. Lennon wrote it and plays the piano, with Klaus Voormann on bass and Ringo Starr on drums, and he produced it with Yoko Ono and Phil Spector.

It's addressed to both his parents, and both left him as a child: his father Alf walked out when John was a baby, and his mother Julia, who did not live with him, died in a car crash when he was 17. At one of his last concerts, Lennon said the song reached far past his own family, to nearly every parent, the living and the half-dead. In America Apple cut it down for a single at the end of that December, fading out sooner and dropping the bells.

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