John Lennon & Yoko Ono - Milk & Honey
#14
January 27 1984
John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Milk & Honey
3.25 out of 5
Highlights:
Don’t Be Scared
Nobody Told Me
Grow Old With Me
I really enjoyed the back and forth duality of Double Fantasy. It felt organic in the playfulness and charming in Lennon’s rebirth. This feels compiled, which I guess it was.
Strange that the strongest Lennon tune, and the one that sounds the most fleshed out, doesn’t come until the end of Side One. Why not lead off with a song that could set the tone for the album. If this record would score higher I would probably rearrange the tracks to lead off with it and put “Steppin’ Out” in it’s place, at the end, where it belongs. So you can get up and turn the record over when it comes on because you also know that Yoko’s Side One ender “O’ Sanity” is a 1 minute trifle but a kind of hilarious one that opens a little window into what she must have been going through. I applaud it’s ending. Big ups to you, Yoko.
It’s really challenging to be objective about this record given the circumstances but so much of it is not great and that plodding mediocrity falls on both Yoko’s work and John’s. And, when it succeeds, it’s just fine. I’ve never been a fan of Lennon’s solo work and less so Ono’s.
But, as the album draws to a close and the lo-fi “Grow Old with Me” plays after the melancholy “Let Me Count the Ways” I am struck by how much this song, with that tambourine and it’s playfully wistful melody that calls to mind McCartney’s work, has found me with a lump in my throat.
Context is everything in this case.
Less an album than a final statement or a closing chapter. Wholly appropriate that Ono gets the last word. Impossible for her to tell John what she wants to and it’s she that will live on, in real life and as the album closes that chapter.
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