The world might have imagined what Yoko Ono in mourning would sound like—shrieking, moaning, howling—yet this was not the face she turned to the world. On “Goodbye Sadness,” “Toyboat,” “Silver Horse,” and “Mother of the Universe,” Ono sings in gorgeous, long-breathed melodies, often multi-tracked in harmony, while the music gently rocks and sways, offering muted variations on her husband’s beloved doo-wop and soul ballads. It is, in a word, glassy—smooth, brittle, transparent. She was no longer using her voice as a “warrior” might wield a sword, as she once put it. These were lullabies to hope, delivered with the beatific calm of a dying opera heroine’s final aria.
Rubberneckers or armchair psychologists could easily impute trauma. Perhaps this was the sound of shock, numbness, resignation. The lyrics are full of unanswered prayers: The “Silver Horse” that arrives to bear her away someplace beautiful has no wings, while the tiny triangular sail on the horizon turns out to be just a toy boat. But one of the most fascinating things about Season of Glass is that apart from “I Don’t Know Why” and the savage “No, No, No,” the majority of it was written years earlier, at a time when Ono was not the Dear Leader’s widow but the most hated spouse in the history of popular music. The album is less a eulogy than a piece of unfinished business, and any relation to John’s murder are mostly tricks of the light.
The heart-rending opening ballad “Goodbye Sadness,” for example, stems from Lennon’s infamous mid-’70s “Lost Weekend, ” a bender that lasted more than a year. After Ono sent him packing, Lennon disappeared into drinking and drugs, getting shitfaced with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson and sleeping with the paramour Ono had handpicked for him, May Pang.
The wistful second track, “Mindweaver,” cannot help but scan, in context, like posthumous mythmaking (“He was a mindweaver…”). But Ono wrote it in 1980, when Lennon was in Bermuda, and the song depicts their relationship at its most exhausting and draining (its original title was “Mindfucker”). The lyrics to “Extension 33” might seem coarse or shocking in the context of John’s murder—“Once I had a love, it nearly killed me/But now I have my freedom”—but the song dates from the same mid-’70s time period as “Goodbye Sadness,” when Ono briefly exited the toxic cloud of Beatledom and, as her 1975 album title had it, was Feeling the Space.
Save for the exception of the gunshots that ring out at the beginning of “No, No, No,” these songs didn’t spring from Lennon’s murder, but they did pointedly address his absence. Yoko Ono was five years ahead in everything—in conceptual art, staging loft concerts, punk rock. Now, ironically, she was five years ahead of her own grief. If John Lennon seems maddeningly alive in these songs, it’s because when she wrote them, he was.