Sean Ono Lennon has sat down for a full-length interview with Rick Beato, in which he talks about creativity, music in general and, inevitably, his two parents.
It’s hard to believe, but the toddler who was hymned on his dad’s final album as Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) is now 50 years old and, with his long tresses and beard, looks the spit of his old man circa 1969.
At one point Lennon talks about how as an artist himself, he’s drawn to dark, dissonant music and how possibly that’s because of one particular song of his dad’s: “I’ve always had a love of that and I think it’s because of I Want You (She’s So Heavy) – that really impacted me a lot as a kid. I've really wondered where it came from, you know. It's so unprecedented at that time. In a way I think of it like the first really heavy riff. It’s so sophisticated and unlike anything else he wrote otherwise.”
He goes on to talk about another Abbey Road song: Because. “I know where that one came from, because the famous story is that my mom was playing Moonlight Sonata, and he and my dad said, 'Wait, stop, can you play those chords backwards or maybe write them down for me?' And she did, and that was sort of the basis of Because... And that is true. I mean, according to my mom."
At one point Beato asks Lennon about the Beatles' incredible work rate – where did they find the time to write all those songs? "Yeah, the amount of productivity is shocking, because it's two records a year, for eight years… Obviously it’s shocking and it’s unprecedented and inexplicable.”
“But, I’ve thought about it a lot and you know, really, on some records my dad just wrote Walrus for Magical Mystery Tour. That’s one song in six months. Paul and he had each other and then George wrote a song so you know they could go in with three, four songs per record, so it's not like today where they had to write 10 songs and also today some records have 15, 20 songs because of CDs. They were shorter records – they were 30-minute records and they split up the songwriting.”
He also talked about his (very) catholic music taste. “I always felt like I liked something at least from every genre, because there’s always something amazing. I can’t even think of a genre that I really don’t like, maybe some obscure EDM genres that I’m not into.”
“I really like a lot of music from India, Turkey, from the Middle Ages… psyche bands from Greece from the 1970s. I have a lot of Ethiopian jazz. And I’m a bit prog fan.” (That's not that much of a surprise since one of Lennon’s many projects is his collaboration with Primus man Les Claypool, the wonderfully titled Claypool Lennon Delirium.)
