Season of Glass

To mark the 45th anniversary of its release, Secretly Canadian release Ono’s seminal 1981 album Season of Glass, as an expanded CD, and on vinyl for the first time in more than forty-five years, with expanded and enhanced artwork. Hit single “Walking on Thin Ice” is now available to stream everywhere for the first time.

One of Pitchfork’s Top 200 albums of the 1980s, Season of Glass was released in June 1981, just seven months after the senseless murder of Ono’s husband and creative partner, John Lennon. Full of songs about love, loss, anger and fear, the album reflected Ono’s experience in stark detail, creating almost a companion piece to Ono and Lennon’s 1970 Plastic Ono Band “primal scream” albums. 

“Season of Glass was really just being me, I suppose,” Ono told Newsweek in 1982. “Sort of, it was like a primal scream in a way; you know, something happened in my life, and I just had to say it. And I think it was therapeutic for me more than anything else. And I was pretty honest, I suppose.”

The album’s cover was a photograph of Lennon’s blood-soaked glasses, just as they were returned to Ono from Roosevelt Hospital after his murder. Though David Geffen, the head of Geffen Records, who had released Ono and Lennon’s Double Fantasy in November 1980, and released the original version of Season of Glass, implored Ono to change the cover, Ono stood her ground. 

“The record company called me and said the record shops would not stock the record unless I changed the cover,” Ono wrote in the liner notes to ONOBOX. “I didn’t understand it. Why? They said it was in bad taste. I felt like a person soaked in blood coming into a living room full of people and reporting that my husband was dead, his body was taken away, and the pair of glasses were the only thing I had managed to salvage – and people looking at me saying it was in bad taste to show the glasses to them.”

Backed by the same band that had played on Double Fantasy, the sound of Season of Glass sits in alignment next to that album, which at the time was already considered an artistic triumph for Ono, who was inspiring young artists like the B-52s and Sonic Youth.
 
In the years since its release, the honest, loving, sometimes harrowing nature of the songs on Season of Glass have meant that it has only gained in stature. Now universally embraced as a powerful artistic statement about grief and loss, it is considered a landmark release, and among Ono’s best works; a fully realized artistic statement. Ultimately, Season of Glass is a stunning, cathartic listen. Still, Ono has always insisted there’s one thing the album is not: healing.