Music: Last Songs

Six new Lennon oldies

Enough, now. The mourning, and all the indulgence that goes with it, ought to have been set aside. But patience, sympathy and sentiment—in finally impossible amounts—are what is needed for listening to Milk and Honey, twelve songs by John Lennon and Yoko Ono intended to follow up their Double Fantasy alburn, before murder intervened.

Recorded at the same time as Double Fantasy, the material on Milk and Honey reminds us that the earlier album was hardly top-form Lennon. Contented and uncertain and rambunctious by turns—and sometimes at once—Lennon's songs were a retrenchment, not a revelation. So much was always expected of him. He even wrote a song about it, I Don't Wanna Face It, a hard bit of self-deflation ("You wanna save humanity/ But it's people that you just can't stand") that is one of Milk and Honey's sharpest cuts. This song, according to the call-and-response style established by Double Fantasy, is answered by One's reassuring Don't Be Scared, which contains wisdom ("If your hearts are lit/ Drop your survival kit/ Then you never have to/ Run or split") that would be poor balm even to the troubled soul of a fortune-cookie writer.

The record opens with a scrappy declaration of Lennonesque independence, I'm Stepping Out, but I Don't Wanna Face It fades down with a clipped cry that sounds like a housebroken werewolf. The second side offers the unwelcome spectacle of Lennon, abject, begging (Forgive Me) My Little Flower Princess, then following Ono's Let Me Count the Ways with Grow Old with Me. Yoke's album notes explain: "John and I always thought, among many other things, that we were maybe the reincarnation of Robert [Browning] and Liz [Elizabeth Barrett Browning]." Lennon wanted Grow Old with Me to be an anthem for occasions of ceremony and sentiment, like weddings and anniversaries. Just the sort of song, that is, that he twitted Paul McCartney for writing, although not even his ex-writing partner ever sniveled so stereophonically as Lennon as he serenades his flower princess. Ono does display a neat flash of wit in her final song: "In the world's eye/ We were Laurel and Hardy/ In our minds/ We were Heathcliff and Cathy." But hagiography, even half comic, like this, should be resisted. Sentiment might make that hard. But Milk and Honey makes it a cinch. —By Jay Cocks