Sean Ono Lennon on New Mixes, Box Set for John Lennon’s ‘Mind Games’ – MASHAHER

When Sean Ono Lennon — born to John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1975 — was being exposed to his father’s solo canon as a young person, he was hearing it all at once, not sequentially. So he was hearing 1973’s “Mind Games” as one fine album among many, with no need to learn that it was actually an underdog in his dad’s catalog. Cut to 2024, when he is hoping that the Lennon-loving world can evaluate, or reevaluate, “Mind Games” with more of the mindset that he had growing up with it, sans any need to compare it to the ordained classics … or with a mind toward thinking that, heard afresh, maybe it doesn’t suffer in being stacked up against the pillars of the catalog.

Sean has overseen “Ultimate” remixes of the “Mind Games” tracks, in the tradition of what was already done for the “Plastic Ono Band” and “Imagine” albums in recent years. They’re part of several new physical iterations of the “Mind Games” material. Most hardcore John Lennon fans will go for the 6-CD/2-BluRay boxed set titled “Mind Games — The Ultimate Collection — Deluxe Box Set,” which also includes an excellent 128-page hardback book and other artifacts, on top of 72 official music tracks (and a few unofficial hidden ones). (This box is currently available on Amazon for about $167.) For the more budget-minded, there are 2-CD or 2-LP editions that pair the Ultimate remixes with a second disc of outtakes from the ’73 sessions. (The CD version of this condensed set retails for about $30.) And for the not-budget-minded, there is a massive super deluxe version with untold amounts of additional physical material (but the same music as the regular deluxe set) that comes in a massive cube that’s a whole mind game unto itself just to unpack. (That limited edition of 1100 copies goes for $1350.)

If even the most affordable of those sets seem extravagant to you, the 72 official tracks from the deluxe set are all available for streaming on the standard music apps. (Making all this music virtually free to online comers is a mind game even John Lennon couldn’t have imagined.) This streaming availability includes all the bonus discs in the different sets, each of which is fascinating in its own way: Volume 2, the Elemental Mixes, which have Lennon’s vocals over more stripped-down backing tracks; Volume 3, the Elements Mixes, which actually remove Lennon’s vocals and single out just a couple of key instruments at a time; Volume 4, the Evolution Documentaries, which are short audio histories of each track being built from the demos to finish; Volume 5, the Raw Studio Mixes, which provides the finished tracks sans overdubs or reverb effects; and Volume 6, the Outtakes. If you’re really a Lennon-ologist, and/or just a student of how studio sessions get built with great players in the room, none of these volumes is much less valuable than the others.

Variety spoke with Sean Ono Lennon on Friday, as these different “Mind Games” sets were being released to the world, and to a mostly thrilled reaction among fans — some of whom have waited 51 years for this album to really be celebrated, instead of just half-remembered as a nice-enough also-ran in a brilliant career.

Where does “Mind Games” sit in your father’s catalog, for you? And did working on this project change your perception of it at all?

Well, for me personally, “Mind Games” was always one of my favorite albums, and certainly one of my favorite John Lennon albums. So I just felt like it was an amazing opportunity to be able to work on music that I really love from my father. But then there was another level to it, which is that at the time it came out, it was sort of not very well-received, and I think it fell through the cracks a little bit. There’s a lot of reasons for that that have probably nothing to do with the music.

There were a lot of new artists and big pop music on the charts. And then my parents had spent some time being radical political activists, and [the year before “Mind Games”] they did a whole album called “Sometime in New York City” that was extremely political and controversial. Combined with the fact that John and Yoko had done “Two Virgins” and were doing performance art and avant-garde, conceptual happenings and stuff, I think it confused a lot of the mainstream fans — the normies, as we would call them today. So it was a confusing time for the mainstream pop music consumers.  And I don’t think my dad was necessarily that interested in going out of his way to promote the album in a way that they might’ve done in the Beatle era. He did some work to promote it, but he was at a different point in his life where he didn’t feel like he needed to do 10,000 photo shoots and tour and all that. So, for many reasons, there was a confluence of events that that led to that record slipping through the cracks. So I felt lucky to have this chance to reinvestigate an album that I always felt was really amazing, and try to represent it to the world in a way that gave it a second chance, you know?

I grew up with this album, but for some reason, it didn’t really “take.” And probably not many Lennon fans would cite this as their No. 1, or even their second-favorite. But after spending a lot of hours getting inside this box, I feel this might be my favorite of his albums.

That’s cool. That was what I wanted. That’s the dream for me, that someone who had heard it before, but it never really clicked, might reinvestigate it and give it another chance.

The original mix of the album was not beloved by everyone. The word “murky” has been invoked over the years. Do you feel like that might’ve had anything to do with it not clicking as much as it might’ve in the ‘70s, along with the other factors you mentioned? 

It’s actually very hard for me to say, because a lot of albums in the early ‘70s, or mid-‘70s, if you put them on today, they sound smaller than modern records do. So I don’t know if it was the mixes. But it was the first record that my dad chose to produce himself, so it was up to him to oversee the album all the way through to the end, which involves a lot of work that isn’t as fun. The final mix and final mastering, he’d never really had to worry about, because he always had producers running that part of it technically. So I think maybe there wasn’t quite as much attention paid to the final, final, final polishing process. And that’s a very hard part of music — it’s boring and not as fun as writing the songs, recording the songs… Maybe he just didn’t have as much focus for that very last bit. I’m not sure, though. I am obviously speculating, but I want to be very clear that I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know that it was the mixes. But I do know that we spent a lot of time trying to make the record sound better than it had ever sounded, and I think we’ve done that. 

Is there a nutshell way to say what you think the purpose of the Ultimate Mixes is, whether it’s on this one or what you’ve done overall with the different projects leading up to this one? It’s more than just a polish on the original. There’s rethinking involved.

I’ve tried to explain this to some fans who seem confused as to why I’ve made some extreme, or arguably extreme, choices on mixes before with my dad’s stuff. it’s hard to explain where I’m coming from because I’m not trying to do anything that’s clinically or technically correct. There’s no other way for me to do the best job I can do other than to make it as good as it can sound for me personally. For me, these mixes are not about being true to some idea of the past, because those songs have already been out in several versions. I definitely only make choices that feel right to me. And even if someone says to me, “Oh, you should have made this instrument louder or quieter,” I’m sad that they disagree with me, but it doesn’t change my feeling, because that feeling doesn’t change. I make music as my personal avocation, so I have a very strong opinion about what I think is good and bad, mix-wise. I’m doing my very best — and I personally think it sounds great.

Do you have favorite Ultimate mixes on here? Or favorites from among the other discs included in the set? There are things that don’t sound like they’d be the most interesting that turn out to be fascinating, like the disc that just has the songs as instrumentals with a couple of instruments at a time.

Yeah, those Elemental misses turned out to be very beautiful, and they’re very interesting. Those mixes aren’t something that I spent the most time on. It’s something that the fans love, and it’s not hard to do — you just mute everything and leave a slide guitar and organ, you know what I mean? So that doesn’t require a lot of work on our part, but it’s really cool to check it out.

But for me, the stuff that I’m proudest of are the final (Ultimate) mixes of the songs, because they took a lot of work and love. And I think “Out the Blue” and “Aisuimasen (I’m Sorry)” really sound better than they’ve ever sounded to me, for sure. You know, I’ve had my whole life to listen to my dad’s music, and so I feel like I have an advantage, in that way, of revisiting a song that was probably mixed a couple weeks after it had been recorded. And I was listening to “Aisuimasen” when we started the mix, and I was like, “You know, this really sounds like it’s in the vein of a song from ‘Plastic Ono Band,’” his first solo album. I was like, “But it feels like they didn’t really have the punch and the dryness on the drums and the kind of palette and the soundscape that they had on ‘Plastic Ono Band,’ which was so potent and so tightand beautiful.” So I really tried to pretend. I’m like, “Well, what would ‘Aisuimasen’ have sounded like if it had been on ‘Plastic Ono Band’?” That was the perspective I took for it, and I really think that it worked. I think it took the song to a place where it has a lot more oomph, a lot more impact. I think that’s just just me being a big fan of my dad’s work and kind of having a sense of, like, what kind of John Lennon song is it? I’m very proud of that, actually, because when I hear that song now, it moves me in a way that it never quite did before.

That’s a great song. The whole album is an interesting mixture, and maybe that’s one reason to embrace it, if you are a fan of all the sides of John Lennon: There is a lightheartedness to a lot of the album that wasn’t there so much on the previous albums he had done, but then there are also these very serious songs that, as you say, could have been on “Plastic Ono Band” or “Imagine,” and they sit together. But with some of those lighter songs, the album doesn’t feel like it’s taking itself too seriously.

It’s a really a sweet spot for the tonality and the mood. And it’s unique to his work. I mean, I think it’s in a liminal space between very heavy and very light, beautiful kind of pop music. I always loved it growing up, and I didn’t really realize how people had reacted to it, because I wasn’t even born at the time. I just grew up with it as one of my dad’s records, and it was one of my favorites.

I discovered them all at the same time; they were all out. And I always love “Plastic Ono Band,” but you have to kind of strap yourself in and get a box of Kleenex to listen to that record. Whereas “Mind Games” is a record you can just put on and, like, go for a drive or clean your house — but also have a deep experience. But it’s not like “Plastic Ono Band” where it demands a level of kind of emotional self-exploration that can be intense.

When you work on these projects, do you think about like where your parents were at emotionally and in their relationship and everything else? Because not all of the songs, but definitely some of the songs, are about that. Does it take you to that space of imagining where they were at when you’re listening to a song like “Aisuimasen (I’m Sorry)”?

Well, I mean, of course I do. And I think what really struck me in this case, with this album, is that people always talk about how they went through a separation and my dad went to L.A. and all this stuff happened. And I find it really remarkable how clear it is that he was committed to my mom and was in love with her, even in this supposedly troubled time. On the album cover, he made her a giant mountain, and he’s this little tiny figure dwarfed by her kind of incredible magnificence. And all the songs are basically about how much he loves her. So it was very touching in a way, because I went into it thinking, “Oh, this is the album right after he went to L.A. and that lost weekend happened…” They call it The Lost Weekend, even though it was more like a lost year. But what struck me is that even at the time that supposedly was a troubled time, that there was zero doubt, if you pay attention, that he was in love with my mother and was committed to her in the ways that matter most.

Are you already working on Ultimate editions of “Walls and Bridges” or “Double Fantasy” or “Sometime in New York City”?

I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk about what we are putting out, just because I don’t want to say one thing and then it turns out to be changed. It’s a wild and crazy world, and we never know exactly what’s gonna happen. I’m totally just focused on following through on “Mind Games” and making sure that all of the stuff we put in place is released to the world in the most successful way possible.

And, you know, we have more coming this year for “Mind Games,” stuff that we haven’t announced, but stuff that I personally am really looking forward to. And I think people will be excited by stuff that intertwines with the theme of “Mind Games” and the boxed set and the kind of enigmatic side of how we presented this whole thing. I’m still working on that, so I’m not thinking about the next record yet.

There are definitely some playful aspects to this in the way it’s being presented, with hidden tracks and things on the packaging you can only see with an AV light, and then some of the things you’re doing online. And that playfulness goes back to the original record, where, for instance, there was a few seconds of silence that your dad dubbed the Nutopian Anthem.

We also have a website, citizenofnutopia.com — that’s part of the experience. Basically, it’s about meditation, because “Mind Games” is about looking inward as well as outward. So there’s a sort of meditative, positive thinking, positive manifestation aspect, but there’s also a game aspect and a puzzle aspect to what we’re doing. It’s almost hard for me to explain to people all the levels of this project and how they intertwine. But an important part of it is the Citizen of Nutopia website, and there’s things that are gonna be coming later this year that will develop on that theme as well, that will expand upon the theme. It’s worth signing up, is all I’m saying. It’s free, and it’s just for fun, but it’s worth going to the site and figuring out what your Nutopia citizen ID is.

There is also a Lumenate meditation app, with its own set of ambient mixes, that you can play while directing a sort of light show at your closed eyelids. How involved were you with that?

I’m a partner and advisor on the company that owns Lumenate, Beckley Waves, so the guys who made the app are my friends. We did it together. Part of the concept was to connect mental health with mind games, and that’s why we have a donation to Mind, the U.K. mental health charity, on the Nutopia website, trying to raise money for them. With the Lumenate app, I wanted to encourage people to meditate to expanded soundscape versions of the “Mind Games” music. So we did nine meditation mixes, which are filled with things like binaural beats and rhythms that will put your brain into a deeper state of consciousness. And they actually work! I really recommend everyone go try it.

And that’s free as well, so it’s all just for fun. It was just to make it more interesting. Because these records have come out so many times in the past; I don’t want to just put ’em out in a normal way. Like, what’s the point? So I’m trying to do things creatively, because there’s no point in putting them out if we’re not gonna try to do something different.

I just downloaded the Lumenate app to experience the material you came up with for that. I’m interested to try it.

You should give it a try. It’s like a mind journey. It’s fun. Just make sure you don’t have other things going on. It’s kind of like a trip without substances.

As for the CD boxed set itself, we’re fortunate we’re still in a time where these physical media objects can exist. The music itself can exist in streaming form, but the fact is, sometimes it takes a physical object — especially if there is something like an extensive hardback book involved — to get us to sit down and focus on the work for an extended period of time and stay in that headspace.

Yeah, I mean, me too. And, you know, I think a lot of people are cynical about how intricate and expansive the physical editions are — but it’s all on Spotify to listen to, man. If you don’t want to buy the super deluxe or the deluxe CD set or the vinyl set, you don’t have to. I’m a little confused why some people seem to be cynical about how much work we put into the boxed sets, but they’re not for everybody. In fact, the super deluxe, there’s only 1100 of them, so you can’t even get them if you want to, pretty much. [Editor’s note: copies of the $1,350 super deluxe edition are still available as of this writing via the Lennon webstore.] They weren’t designed that everyone has to buy them, and the music is almost free on streaming services. We are putting it out there for everybody to listen to and enjoy. So that’s the most important thing. The music is what matters. All of the boxes and the artifice and the constructed box sets, they’re just fun for us to make and try to make them beautiful for people who appreciate them. But if you don’t want that, then you can always listen to the music another way.

One thing the hardback book in the set is really useful for will be fans of session players, because it includes interviews with Jim Keltner and all these other guys really getting into the intricacies of how these arrangements came together, which will be fascinating for musicians and people who love musicians.

It’s an all-star cast. Ken Ascher wound up writing “Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog and Jim Henson, so the keyboard player on “Mind Games” wound up being an Oscar-nominated film composer. And the bass player, Gordon Edwards, was playing with Nina Simone. Rick Marotta went to do Aretha Franklin after “Mind Games,” and wound up playing on everything from Paul Simon’s records and Fiona Apple’s records — he’s probably the biggest drummer of his generation, after Jim Keltner, who was the biggest drummer of his generation, slightly older. So if you care about music in that way, this record is absolutely essential for any serious musician type who cares about the history of great playing, because this band is as good as it gets for that time period. These guys are serious and they’re young, and they were already like the main session guys, but they hadn’t played on records that are famous to us as the records that they will do a few years after “Mind Games.”

Jim Keltner refers to them in the liner notes as “the east coast Wrecking Crew,” which is something he could get away with saying, since he was the one west coaster joining their ranks for this record.

That’s no joke, man. That’s no joke.

You mentioned the keyboard player becoming an Oscar nominee in the years after this. That’s a good segue to talk about you being an Oscar winner, getting the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for “War Is Over” (shared with directors Dave Mullins and Brad Booker). That has to be very satisfying, where you’re working on something that has to do with your dad’s legacy, but you’re doing original stuff with it and winning an Oscar.

Honestly, I never dreamed that that would happen, and I almost feel like I blacked out when it was happening, like I just woke up and it was a dream. I know it’s real because people mention it to me, but it’s so wild. I’m very grateful that it happened, but it’s almost hard to believe that it’s real because I never imagined that I’d be going to the Oscars. It was surreal and it feels like a dream, to be honest. It doesn’t feel very real, because my daily life is not like that. So the fact that I was hanging out with Nic Cage at the Oscars just seems like some kind of a story I’m gonna tell people.

Does that give you encouragement to do more stuff like that? 

For sure. I mean, I definitely took a big risk doing that “War Is Over” video because everyone told me I was crazy to do it, so I feel vindicated, to be honest. And it did give me the courage to push “Mind Games” even further, even though I had already started working on the “Mind Games” ideas. But winning the Oscar for that film made me feel like it’s good to try things in a new way and try to be innovative and creative. Because they wanted me to make a regular music video and I said, “Well, that doesn’t interest me. I want to make a short film.” Most people don’t do that with catalog music — especially, they don’t do a promotional film that’s an actual narrative. I don’t think anyone had ever really done that before, so everyone thought I was a bit bonkers. Luckily, Peter Jackson thought I was not bonkers, but a lot of people were like, “This is too much. What are you doing?”

So that gave me the courage to follow through with the “Mind Games” stuff. And it’s still coming — there’s more coming this later this year, and I think it’s gonna be fun for people. We’ve got many layers to this boxed set besides the actual cube. We’ve got the Citizens of Nutopia website, the Lumenate app, the meditation, and we also have something else launching that’ll be tied to that, nd it’s all gonna be kind of interconnected in a fun way. 

You had a listening event the other night in New York where many of the musicians from the album joined you. It’s evident from the liner notes in the book for this set that they were supportive of what you did with the new mixes.

I was really nervous, actually, meeting them, in terms of the mix. But when we got out of the the theater, they all seemed pretty happy with the mixes. I wouldn’t expect them to be 100% happy, because sometimes you get attached to the old way that things were done.

But, again, I reiterate to anyone out there who’s worried about the new mixes: The old mixes exist in the world, and will forever be there for you to listen to them the way they came out and the way that my dad made ’em. They’re great too. The record was just as good with those mixes. You know, I’m just trying something different, and I hope people can appreciate that. And if they don’t, it should be fine, because I haven’t changed the old album; it’s still there. So you have more options now, which, in theory, should be a good thing, right?