Yoko Opens Up on "Blueprint"

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"'The first track can't be too long' -- that's the kind of thing John was always saying to me," Yoko Ono says with a fond chuckle. "But I wanted to just do it. I've been noncommercial from the beginning."

Ono is speaking about "I Want You to Remember Me," the chilling two-part track that opens Blueprint for a Sunrise, her first new album in five years. A stark depiction of domestic violence, the song introduces one of Sunrise's central themes: That in a culture obsessed with money and status, values like vulnerability and nurturing are crushed, and women take the hit.

"Many people thought that we could keep getting richer and have fun," she says. "That world was becoming extremely macho. More money, more cars, larger private planes -- who's got the bigger dick? The position of women and children is precarious in that world."

In recent years, Ono has concentrated primarily on her conceptual artwork, which was the subject of a major retrospective in New York last year and of subsequent exhibitions around the world.

"It's very necessary for my physical and emotional health that I create," says Ono, sixty-eight. "For this album, I wanted to make a musical collage. It's like a diary."

The dramatic interplay between tension and compassion on Sunrise makes the album particularly compelling in the wake of September 11th. "Have courage/Have rage/We're all together," Ono intones over a mesmerizing guitar part in "Rising."

"Yeah, this album is OK," Ono says about her new record's strange relevance in a changed world. "It fits right in."

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Song Stories

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The Joy Formidable | 2011

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”

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