John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Milk and Honey

Well, here’s another one I hadn’t listened to in decades, and didn’t really remember very well. There were a couple of tracks that had made it onto mix tapes at the time, and those certainly lingered in my memory, but it wasn’t like “Double Fantasy,” which got tons of play before I set it aside.

This was a posthumous release, just over three years after Lennon’s murder. I was no longer a college student, living in our first married apartment in Syracuse. Music had moved on from 1980, and I was at the time deeply into Joe Jackson, the Pretenders, Marc Almond and ABC. So I’m sure I bought this, put the best song or two on tape somewhere, and didn’t give it much further thought. In later years, when I was giving the complete Beatles or Beatles-adjacent catalog a play, it probably came out but didn’t make a huge impression.

Listening to it now, however, I like it rather better than “Double Fantasy.” The Yoko songs are pretty good, the John songs far less romantic and cloying than some of his “Double Fantasy” tracks had been. A solid album, of its time. Nothing revelatory, nothing phenomenal, but a solid album.