“Woman’s career is not taken seriously,” Yoko Ono told writer Joy Press in the mid-’90s, “so no-one’s keeping an archive for you.” The subsequent reappraisals of Ono’s body of work over the decades have been informed by many things – Beatles adjacency, feminist critique, art historical reimaginings, experimental film explorations – but shadowing it all has been a sense that we’re never quite getting the full picture of all Ono has achieved over her seven-decade career in art, music, film and writing.
That Season Of Glass is often read as her best album tells us much about how context informs reception. Recorded after the murder of her husband, John Lennon, it’s long been understood as an exploration of grief and personal crisis. The truth is more complex, as much of the material on Season Of Glass was written well before Lennon’s murder in December 1980. But even on its release, the album’s depths were overwritten both by the resonant shocks of Lennon’s passing, and some degree of the twin forces of sexism and racism that Ono’s simple presence released in many observers.
For Ono, making music became refuge in 1981, a space where she could begin to process the loss of her husband. It’s tempting also to see the studio, The Hit Factory, as a kind of shelter and isolation from the spiralling and uncontrollable energies of collective mourning that Lennon’s death unleashed. Co-producing with Phil Spector, Ono fashioned an album that seemed to capture the colliding emotions and reflections that take over our bodies after loss – sadness, obviously, but also rage and anger, a sense of unfairness, confusion, a desire for peace and resolution, and a recognition, ultimately, that grief is a thread that never fully unspools.
The core of Season Of Glass seems, in many ways, to be the songs that manifest frustration and unfairness – “I Don’t Know Why”, where the tension and ferocity of the music, coupled with Ono’s furious declamation near the song’s end – “you bastards!/Hate us, hate me!/We had everything” – never quite conceals a febrile fragility. “No, No, No” opens with gunshots before an itchy rhythm shepherds the song into a space of tightly delineated anxiety, guitars clanging and scratching as they weave under Ono’s perplexed delivery.
But it’s often the seemingly softer, gentler moments that carry the most emotional weight. The overarching mood of Season Of Glass seems to be one of baffled numbness – baffled in both senses of the word, both perplexed and restrained – with a surface that feels brittle to touch, antiseptic cold. It captures the shock and shutdown that so often comes immediately after unexpected and traumatic loss. In this respect, the hope against hope of “Goodbye Sadness”, the blank-eyed blues of “Mother Of The Universe”, and the dissolving melancholy of “Even When You’re Far Away” makes for some of the most powerful material here, trying to find a tenderness within existential heartbreak.
Of course, towering over everything is the extra track, Ono’s 1981 near-hit, “Walking On Thin Ice”. It’s one of the great artworks of the late 20th century in any medium. It was a moment of creative rupture for both Ono and Lennon, the latter seemingly re-energised by hearing what was emerging from a nascent post-punk underground – he’d already perceptively joined the dots between Ono’s ‘solo scream’ and the vocals on The B-52’s’ “Rock Lobster”, and “Walking On Thin Ice”’s frosty, deoxygenated disco-not-disco sits neatly alongside soon-to-come productions from the likes of Arthur Russell and Bill Laswell.
It also features some of Lennon’s most extraordinary guitar playing, something that Ono alone seemed capable of teasing out of her partner. There’s a throughline of incendiary guitar underpinning Ono’s solo material, starting with the furious freedoms of the Plastic Ono Band’s “Why”, back in 1970; it was as though Ono’s focused unleashing of the vocal furies in her performance challenged Lennon to embrace the possibilities of free music within a rock’n’roll context, something that relatively few guitarists had truly grappled with at the time – maybe only Jimi Hendrix and Terry Kath had made a similar contextual leap.
On its release, Season Of Glass marked the beginning of a slow-burn critical reappraisal of Ono’s music. It was received relatively well, which tells us more about (predominantly male) critics, and their capacity only to praise female artists when they’re exploring suffering, grief and/or melancholy, than it does about Ono’s art. After all, there is not a huge leap from some of the material on her final album with Lennon,1980’s Double Fantasy, to the deceptive placidity of the songs and production here.
But perhaps the cover art is our biggest clue to Season Of Glass’s complicated sensibility – clarity hiding in plain sight. Setting Lennon’s blood-stained glasses next to a half-empty glass of water, with Central Park and the New York skyline in the background, it’s both an elegant and direct address of what had happened and what gave rise, ultimately, to Season Of Glass, and a startingly direct rupture of the real into the listener’s everyday. When her label baulked at the image, Ono stood firm. “I’m not changing the cover,” she said. “This is what John is now.”