How John Lennon’s legacy is being updated and polished by his son Sean Ono
John Lennon’s son, who won an Oscar for a short film based on his parents’ song Happy Christmas, has remixed Lennon’s Mind Games album
Only recently given stewardship over his late father’s work, Sean Ono Lennon is on a remarkable run.
The only child of John Lennon and Yoko Ono won an Academy Award this year for a short film based on his parents’ 1971 song “Happy Christmas (‘War is Over’)” and, a few months later, was nominated for his first Grammy, for producing a box set on the album Mind Games, originally released in 1973.
“It feels overwhelming and surreal,” said Lennon, who also recently shared a Webby Award with his mother for Ono’s interactive art project Wish Tree.
For Lennon, who was five when the former Beatle was murdered in 1980, the work is a way to connect with his father. It is more than a preservation mission: on Mind Games he takes artistic licence, pulling apart the recordings of John Lennon’s music to create something entirely new.
Lennon was inspired, in part, by another Beatle child, Dhani Harrison, who helped repackage his father’s album All Things Must Pass.
Dhani Harrison is also behind this autumn’s reissue of his dad’s album Living in the Material World, but that experience is nothing like what Lennon did with Mind Games.
