A pig held by the ears on the back cover. While Paul McCartney posed with ram’s horns on his 1971 solo debut, John Lennon answered with a farm animal of his own. That visual jab was just one detail on an album that arrived 55 years ago, on September 9, 1971, when Imagine became Lennon’s second solo studio release on Apple Records.
Lush arrangements after the primal scream
The album grew out of sessions spread across Ascot Sound Studios, EMI Recording Studios, and the Record Plant in New York. Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Phil Spector shared production duties. Where John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band had stripped everything to the bone, Imagine built lush arrangements featuring George Harrison on guitar, Nicky Hopkins on keys, and Klaus Voormann on bass.
Alan White and Jim Keltner split the drumming. The title track ran 2 minutes and 58 seconds, with Lennon on vocals and piano, Voormann on bass, and White on drums. That song would become Lennon’s signature, its lyric “Above us only sky” echoed on the back cover photo of him staring upward.
Warhol's portrait and McCartney's reckoning
The blue-toned artwork came from an Andy Warhol portrait on the front. A sky motif ran through the packaging, but the music inside carried sharper edges. How Do You Sleep? attacked McCartney directly, born from a period of intense personal tension between the former writing partners. The lyrics across the album touched on peace, love, and politics, leaning more political than its predecessor.
Lennon’s experience with primal scream therapy shaped the songwriting. His raw emotional state fed both the vulnerability and the venom. The album became a commercial success and a critical favorite, expanding the sonic palette while preserving the confessional core of his first post-Beatles statement.
Lost footage and a Soviet pressing
Extensive studio footage was shot for a documentary that never materialized. Those tapes resurfaced decades later, first in the 1988 film Imagine: John Lennon and then in 2018’s John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky, giving fans an intimate look at the creative process behind this landmark record.
The album’s reach extended far beyond the West. In 1977, the Soviet label Melodiya released Imagine, six years after its global premiere. By late 1978, readers of Moskovsky Komsomolets had voted it seventh place in the Zvukovaya Dorozhka chart, and it won Best Album with 315 votes.
That Soviet edition carried Lennon’s voice to listeners behind the Iron Curtain, where the title track’s plea for a world without borders or religion took on a different weight. The album had traveled from Abbey Road to Moscow, its message mutating with each pressing.
Imagine was recorded on both sides of the Atlantic, a transatlantic production that mirrored its universal ambitions. Lennon, Ono, and Spector crafted a record that felt intimate and enormous, personal and political, tender and cruel.
Fifty-five years later, that pig on the back cover still grins. The ram has long since been outgrown, but Imagine remains suspended in its sky-blue frame, above us only sky, still asking the same impossible question.