Imagine (album) - Recording and Structure

Recording and Structure

Although the basic tracks for Imagine were initially recorded at his home studio, Ascot Sound Studios in Tittenhurst Park, many of the instruments were re-recorded at the Record Plant in New York City, where strings and saxophone by King Curtis were also added. As on his last album, Phil Spector joined Lennon and Yoko Ono as co-producer on Imagine, and the ex-Beatles' mainstay, Klaus Voormann, returned on bass. Extensive footage of the sessions, showing the evolution of some of the songs, was compiled on a video documentary entitled Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon's Imagine.

The first songs, "It's So Hard" and "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier, Mama, I Don't Want to Die", were recorded in February 1971 at Abbey Road Studios, during sessions for Lennon's single "Power to the People". (Other sources give the location as Ascot, however.) Musicians at the these sessions included drummer Jim Gordon, soon to be ex-Derek & The Dominos. A cover of The Olympics' 1958 song "Well (Baby Please Don't Go)", later released on John Lennon Anthology, was also recorded during this time. Lennon would choose to remake "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier", however, once the main album sessions were under way.

Gathering at Ascot Sound in late June, Lennon enlisted help from Nicky Hopkins, members of the Apple band Badfinger, Alan White and Jim Keltner. George Harrison would also drop by to contribute lead guitar parts, before soon heading off to organise the Concert for Bangladesh.

The title track "Imagine" became Lennon's signature song and was written as a plea for world peace. "Jealous Guy" has also had enduring popularity; it was originally composed as "Child of Nature" during the songwriting sessions in India in 1968 that led to The Beatles' double album The Beatles. "Oh My Love" and the song "How?" were influenced by his experience with primal therapy: "How?" contains the questions he was facing while going through the changes produced in him during the ongoing process of primal therapy, while "Oh My Love" was written to communicate the joy and growth Lennon was experiencing as a result of the therapy.

Lennon also indulged his love of rock and roll with "Crippled Inside" and "It's So Hard". "Gimme Some Truth", originally heard during the Let It Be sessions in early 1969, appears on the album with a new bridge. The politically themed "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier" closes the first half of Imagine in a cacophonous manner.

Imagine was written and recorded during a period of particularly bad feeling between Lennon and former bandmate Paul McCartney, following The Beatles' break-up the year before and McCartney winning his case in the High Court to have their legal partnership dissolved. Harrison guested on half of Imagine 's ten tracks, including the brutal "How Do You Sleep?" − a song written in retaliation against McCartney's alleged personal attacks on Lennon and Ono, on the recent Ram album. Although Lennon softened his stance in the mid '70s and claimed he wrote "How Do You Sleep?" about himself, he revealed in 1980: "I used my resentment against Paul ... to create a song ... not a terrible vicious horrible vendetta ... I used my resentment and withdrawing from Paul and The Beatles, and the relationship with Paul, to write 'How Do You Sleep'. I don't really go 'round with those thoughts in my head all the time ..."

The last song on the album was "Oh Yoko!" EMI pushed for this track to be the single, but Lennon thought it was too "pop".