Forty-seven years after she co-wrote it with her husband John Lennon, Yoko Ono has released a new version of his signature solo hit, Imagine.
Taken from her forthcoming new album Warzone, Ono, 85, creates a new arrangement, first set to drifting ambient tones before the famous piano motif is brought in later on.
Until recently, the song was credited solely to Lennon; Ono was added as a co-writer in 2017. The song’s central lyrical structure, a series of wistful, utopian scenarios, was inspired by Ono’s poetry collection Grapefruit, which featured lines like: “Imagine your head filled with pencil leads / Imagine one of them broken.” Lennon had acknowledged her contribution in a 1980 interview, saying: “A lot of it – the lyric and the concept – came from Yoko. But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho, and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution. But it was right out of Grapefruit, her book.”
Warzone reimagines other songs she originally wrote between 1970 and 2009. She has since continued her career in visual and conceptual art, unveiling her first permanent installation, Skylanding, in 2016. She also recorded a voice part for Wes Anderson’s 2018 film Isle of Dogs, playing a scientist called Yoko Ono.
