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Milk and Honey
‘Happy Birthday, John. God bless our love.’
– Yoko Ono, 1984
A Heart Play by John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Produced by John Lennon and Yoko Ono
Track Listing
- 4:07
- 2:34
- 3:22
- 2:45
- 3:34
- 1:06
- 4:29
- 3:04
- 2:28
- 2:17
- 3:09
- 3:57
MILK AND HONEY
One early morning in the summer of 1980, I woke up with “Let Me Count The Ways” ringing in my head. I called John who was then in Bermuda and played it over the phone. “How d’you like it?” “I really like it. It’s beautiful”. “How about you writing one with a Robert Browning line and we’ll have portraits of us as Elizabeth and Robert on the cover?” (This needs a little explaining. John and I always thought, among many other things, that we were maybe the reincarnation of Robert and Liz. So he immediately knew what I was talking about). We discussed then about Double Fantasy cover that it should be two portraits, one of Elizabeth and the other of Robert, only the faces would be ours. John thought we should look very prim and proper with just our hands coming out of the paintings and holding in the middle, the funny touch. We both laughed. “Okay then, just tell downstairs (our office) to send me the collec- tion of Robert Browning and let’s see what happens”. It wasn’t necessary, however, to send the collection to Bermuda. John called me that afternoon “Hey, you won’t believe this!” He explained that he was watching the TV, a fifties film of a baseball player. In the film, John saw the girlfriend send a poem to her baseball player, a poem which was one by Robert Browning called “Grow Old Beside Me”. “Can you believe that?….so anyways, this is my version”. John proudly played his song over the phone.That’s how our two songs happened.
To us, these two songs were the backbone of Double Fantasy, and we kept discussing how we would arrange them. For John, “Grow Old With Me”was one that would be a standard, the kind that they would play in church every time a couple gets married. It was horns and symphony time. But we were working against deadline for the Christmas release of the album, kept holding “Grow Old With Me” to the end, and finally decided it was better to leave the song for “Milk and Honey” so we won’t do a rush job.
December 25 ’80, I discovered that I received a Christmas present from John which he had bought and had it held as a surprise for me. It was a portrait and an original handwriting of Elizabeth Browning framed side by side. Sean received an Akita puppy, and named her Merry as in Merry Christmas. It was a cold day, and I remember Sean’s thoughtful voice explaining to me how he named her Merry. Sean also received a watch inscribed in the back from Dad and Mom, which disappeared later.
“Grow Old With Me” was a song John made several cassettes of, as we discussed the arrangements for it. Everybody around us knew how important those cassettes were.They were in safekeeping, some in our bedroom, some in our cassette file, and some in a vault. All of them disappeared since then except the one on this record. It may be that it was meant to be this way, since the version that was left to us was John’s last recording.The one John and I recorded together in our bedroom with a piano and a rhythm box.
From ’81 to ’83, it was as though Sean and I were standing in a snowfield surrounded by human wolves, who claimed themselves “close friends” and meanwhile raped and desecrated John’s body in front of our eyes. We saw beautiful rainbows behind the black forest and people calling us with love from the distance, but there was no way to let them know what was happening. And Sean and I decided to call the rainbow to us by sharing our song with you.
Happy birthday, John. God bless our love.
October 9th ’83 N.Y.C. y.o.
Yoko says ‘Milk And Honey…John thought of the album title Double Fantasy. I thought of Milk And Honey for the next album. He liked that. People who wish to immigrate to USA, dream of America, “the land of milk and honey.” But also, in the Scripture, the land of milk and honey is where you go after you die, as a promised land. So it’s very strange that I thought of that title. Almost scary – like somebody up there told me to call the next album Milk And Honey.’
‘And what about John’s songs in it: ‘I’m Stepping Out’, ‘I Don’t Wanna Face It’, ‘Nobody Told Me’, ‘Borrowed Time’? John decided those titles. And the contents of the songs do not necessarily have to do with his passing. But still it’s eery. Even the message of ‘Grow Old With Me’ could be interpreted in many ways to be his final wish. However, our fate was hidden from us, totally.’
Its cover artwork suggests a sequel to Double Fantasy – their respective photographs of John and Yoko look separated by mere moments (as indeed they were). Yet, for us, the albums are divided by the widest gulf we could possibly imagine – the death of John, which occurred in between.
Maybe for this reason, Milk And Honey has always seemed an orphan among John Lennon’s recordings. It was the first posthumous release of unheard material, appearing some three years after his death. His own contributions to the album were never signed off by John himself. Like Double Fantasy, the record is structured as a “Heart Play”, or dialogue, of his songs and Yoko’s. But he was not there to help her assemble that particular conversation. With one or two notable exceptions, he was not familiar with Yoko’s tracks, at least not in their finished form.
And yet, Milk And Honey is a great John and Yoko record. It fully deserves its place in the tradition of Double Fantasy or their early avant-garde releases or any of the towering songs their names are jointly engraved upon, from ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’ to ‘Woman Is The Nigger Of The World’. We know that John was looking forward to a follow-up, to be called Milk And Honey, and that he believed he already had a lot of material. We can only speculate how closely it would have resembled the album we know, but there is not the slightest doubt that Milk And Honey is true to Lennon’s spirit. We should open our ears and welcome it.
For her part, his wife and artistic partner Yoko Ono has never regarded Milk And Honey as fundamentally separate from Double Fantasy: ‘We went into recording on August 4th 1980. We recorded all the basic tracks for Double Fantasy and Milk And Honey. John knew all my songs in Milk And Honey, except for ‘You’re The One’, which I wrote after John’s passing as a tribute to him. We tried ‘Sleepless Night’, ‘O Sanity’ and ‘Let Me Count The Ways’ at the Double Fantasy sessions. With ‘Let Me Count The Ways’, I played it first to him over the phone, when he was in Bermuda. Well, that’s another story.’
John and Sean on the ferry to Nine Dragon Island, Hong Kong, June 1977 Photo by Nishi F. Saimaru ©1977 Nishi F. Saimaru
John and Sean Lennon, Onioshidashi, Japan, Summer 1977 Photo by Nishi F. Saimaru ©1977 Nishi F. Saimaru
But was the “dialogue” of Milk And Honey a challenge to construct, given John’s absence?
‘I didn’t feel that way. Since, we both had a say in how the dialogue should be in Double Fantasy.’ says Yoko today, ‘And with Milk And Honey, the thing was already there.’
As well as comprising a clutch of first-rate songs, Milk And Honey is another compelling (and candid) narrative of the final five years in John’s life. Whatever else it may be, Milk And Honey is not a requiem album. In ‘I’m Stepping Out’ we hear the same mischievous John we might recognise from ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, revelling in a night of escapist fun. (And in Yoko’s fiercely physical ‘Sleepless Night’ we hear a kindred spirit.) His ‘I Don’t Wanna Face It’ is a wittily unsparing exercise in self-criticism (gently countered by Yoko’s song of reassurance, ‘Don’t Be Scared’). And ‘Nobody Told Me’ is a glimpse into the occasional frustrations of his existence.
John & Yoko, in fancy dress, 1977 Photo by Nishi F. Saimaru ©1977 Nishi F. Saimaru
Milk and Honey rear album cover original photograph Photos by Kishin Shinoyama - ©1980 Yoko Ono
John & Yoko, eating breakfast, 1980 Photo by Nishi F. Saimaru ©1980 Nishi F. Saimaru
Not for the first time in his work, John owns up to his own shortcomings as a husband, this time in ‘(Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess’, But the tropically mellow ‘Borrowed Time’ suggest a man who is, in the last analysis, at peace with himself and enjoying his maturity. For her part, Yoko complements his self-portraits beautifully, with reflections on doubt (‘O Sanity’), eroticism (‘Your Hands’) and the poignantly romantic ‘You’re The One’.
At the very heart of Milk And Honey, however, are two extraordinary songs. Yoko’s ‘Let Me Count The Ways’ and John’s ‘Grow Old With Me’ were inspired by the Victorian poets Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with whom the Lennons felt a deep affinity. These numbers were written for Double Fantasy, when John was on holiday in Bermuda and Yoko was in New York, recorded onto cassette, but then set aside for the next album. Now they sit together in the closing stages of Milk And Honey, perfect companion pieces. They hold the record in some place out of chronological time, eternally hopeful.
The sad irony of ‘Grow Old With Me’ need not be laboured. John wished, says Yoko, that the song might one day be a standard – performed, perhaps, at weddings. It deserves no less. As with John’s other cuts on Milk And Honey, the fact that he could not re-visit his original version of Grow Old With Me is really no problem at all. As matters stand, his vocal has the natural intimacy that further studio treatment might have obscured.
Though Milk And Honey was, of necessity, a posthumous album, it is not a memorial. Its tone is only momentarily elegiac. Several songs are by turns rowdy, optimistic, comic and frankly sensual. To Yoko Ono fell the task of presenting John’s final work in a properly coherent setting, in line with the plans they had already made for the record after Double Fantasy, and his complex personality is superbly captured. Decades have now passed since Milk And Honey was conceived, but our fascination with this extraordinary man has not diminished. His songs do not lose their power to move, excite or enlighten us.
