Oh Yoko!

The first time Oh Yoko! plays, Nicky Hopkins' piano enters with a playful sway that seems to carry everything else along. It's a folk ballad that never stays still, with a rhythm that oscillates between carefree and melancholic, as if Lennon had found a way to turn a sigh into a melody. The harmonica that peeks in during the opening measures — something he hadn't used solo since his Beatles days — lends an air of improvised nostalgia, as if the song had been born from a spontaneous moment. The most curious detail lies in that blend of tenderness and urgency: it speaks of love, but not with solemnity, rather with the same natural ease as mentioning someone in everyday conversation.

The lyrics were written in 1968, during the Beatles' stay in India, but weren't fully realized until the Imagine sessions in 1971. Lennon admitted the melody came to him inspired by Lonnie Donegan's Lost John, a song he used to play in his early years. They recorded it in May of that year at Ascot Sound Studios, with Phil Spector as producer and backing vocalist, and an incomplete version was captured on a tape from the Oceanus Hotel in Freeport, Bahamas, two years earlier. Though the label wanted to release it as a single, he preferred the album to stand on its own: only Imagine reached the U.S. charts, while in the UK there was no official release. At 4:20 in length, the song later slipped into the compilation Working Class Hero, but its essence remains that blend of simplicity and depth that makes it sound like a shared secret.