Sean Lennon Articles

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Sean Lennon, son of John and Yoko, was overwhelmed by the number of fans which flocked to get his autograph in Toronto earlier this month.

After finishing his half-hour set at the Molson Amphitheatre, opening for Beck and Ben Folds Five, the 22-year-old musician, whose debut solo album is Into The Sun, literally did stare at the sun when he came out-front and perched on the stage to talk to the kids.

When they greeted him warmly, he came down to the floor, still behind the barrier, and chatted, hugged and signed about a hundred autographs well into Ben Folds Five's set.

"That was great," said Lennon afterwards. "I didn't know I had so many fans. The young kids really like my music and get it. They don't have any preconceived ideas -- they weren't raised on The Beatles."

Lennon returns to Toronto on July 15, at Lee's Palace, with another famous son, Rufus Wainright. They play Montreal July 13. The venue has yet to be announced.

Monday, June 1, 1998

Into the son

Lennon legacy's a hindrance as well as a help to Sean

By KIERAN GRANT

Toronto Sun

If Sean Lennon has inherited anything from his father, it's his tendency to be misquoted.

The 22-year-old son of Yoko Ono and the late John Lennon recently followed in his parents' musical footsteps with his debut solo album, Into The Sun. He plays the Molson Amphitheatre Wednesday with headliner Beck and Ben Folds Five.

But last month, when New Yorker magazine reportedly quoted him out of context about his father's 1980 assassination being part of a U.S. government conspiracy, the headlines eclipsed Into The Sun and the singer regretted saying anything at all.

"I don't regret it anymore," Lennon says recently, over the phone from hometown New York City. "People know how I feel, now that it's kind of cooled over a little bit."

The experience also taught Lennon a bit about media manipulation, a task his dad mastered after his own famous misquote about The Beatles being bigger than Jesus.

Lennon Jr.'s conspiracy theories are a tough sell.

Then again, my father wasn't murdered when I was six.

It is well-documented, however, that the U.S. government did a lot of snooping and sliming in order to have John Lennon deported in the early '70s.

"People don't really know that, though," his son says. "The people who do know that really supported me in what I said."

There are other bothersome stories. The U.K. music press is all but selling tickets to a trumped-up rivalry between Lennon and half-brother Julian, whose new record came out the same day as Into The Sun. All lies, Lennon says.

Then there are the John and Yoko parallels being made now that Lennon The Younger is dating Yuka Honda -- one half of trip-hop-pop outfit Cibo Matto -- who happens to be a slightly older woman from Japan

"This is the first girlfriend I've had from Japan," Lennon says, bristling. "It just happens to be at a time when my life is more exposed. People draw comparisons, and I don't really care to. Yuka is nothing like my mom, other than she's Japanese. People say she looks like my mom, which is racist, I think. It's like me saying LL Cool J looks like Jimi Hendrix because he's black."

Still, Lennon says he's used to the territory that goes with having legendary parents.

"It seems to affect other people a lot," he says. "It seems to affect how they deal with my music, which makes me sad.

"I don't know what they're looking for. It's not like when I write a song I'm thinking, 'My dad wrote Strawberry Fields.'

"The people who are hung up on that are just going to lose interest after a while, because they're not interested in me, they're interested in The Beatles. I have nothing to do with The Beatles."

He adds with a laugh: "I've had people at my shows be like, 'Play a Beatles song.' I'm like, 'F--- off.' "

With Into The Sun, which came out last month on the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label, Lennon has made a record that will throw the Beatle nuts off his trail. Even with a voice and sense of melody that are a bit like Dad's, the links are primarily genetic.

Lennon's biggest influence came in the muse-like form of Honda, who produced the album and inspired the songs.

"The record is really about our relationship," Lennon says. "Our musical relationship is evolving along with our personal relationship."

Suitably, Into The Sun is an unpretentious, lo-fi record that pits space-pop, funky beats, Latin jazz and folk sounds against unapologetically gooey love ballads.

"I definitely wanted to make sure that the record sounded more like a demo than a finished, polished product," he says. "I wanted to maintain the original intent of the songs, and not produce them to the extent that they become something else."

It was that same protectiveness that prompted Lennon to wait out years of major-label offers until the right interest, and the right album, came along.

"When a big business wants to sign Sean Lennon, they have to think that they can make money because of the name," he says. "If they didn't think that, they wouldn't be a good company.

"I have nothing against that. But it wasn't what I wanted."

Wednesday, April 29, 1998

Sean Lennon downplays conspiracy theory

Jam! Music

Considering Sean Lennon felt betrayed by the press over his remarks about the death of his father, the 22-year-old musician is surprisingly open and friendly when it comes to chatting about his two main passions: his debut solo album, "Into The Sun", and his girlfriend, musician Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto.

"Now I'm much more on my guard, even though I should probably be even more so," admits Lennon in a phone interview this week.

The only son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono reportedly told New Yorker magazine's Rebecca Mead that a government conspiracy was behind his father's assassination. The quote was picked up by media outlets around the world, completely overshadowing the fact that he has an album coming out May 5 on the Beastie Boys Grand Royal label, distributed by Capitol/EMI.

"That quote was obviously taken completely out of context," Lennon says. "I didn't focus my interview on that quote at all, the way the article made it sound. It did come out, but as soon as I said it, I regretted it.

"I usually tend to trust the nice side of people, and I tried to appeal to her kindness. I phoned her and said, 'Look, Rebecca, please don't print that because it will really give me a lot of problems,' and she did anyway, which I think is kind of mean. Not only did she print it but she printed it a week earlier than the article was supposed to come out."

That "betrayal", as Lennon calls it, seems to have cured him of his naivete and made him much more aware of what he says to the press -- and just in time for the hundreds of interviews he'll be doing to support the trippy art-pop "Into The Sun".

Lennon has carefully guided his career and patiently waited for the right opportunity to release a solo album. (He's already recorded and toured with his mother and alt-poppers Cibo Matto).

The budding career of half-brother Julian Lennon in the late '80s/early '90s was almost killed by the hype that surrounded the son-of-a-Beatle and the molding and shaping of his music and image by the powers that be.

"I think it was especially hard for him," says Lennon. "The press was really mean to him and he had a really difficult situation with his management and his record company -- they really tried to exploit him and exploit his name. I really tried to learn from the difficulties that he had been through, and I think it paid off."

Lennon, who picked up guitar and piano before he was out of single-digits, started writing "very song-y" originals at age 12, but by the time he hit 15 much of his material was similar to that which he's doing today, artful and genre-splicing.

When the industry discovered that yet another son of John Lennon's was a singer-songwriter, they showed immediate interest. But Lennon didn't.

"I never wanted to sign a contract. I wasn't ready, first of all," he explains, "but I also felt like the main reason they were motivated in considering me was because of my last name, so I never really felt that confident about where their interests were. Whereas when (Beastie Boy) Adam Yauch asked me to release a record on Grand Royal, I knew it wasn't because of my last name, because he's not that superficial. He really liked the music that I was doing. That was the first time that I felt comfortable with it."

The music Lennon is doing on "Into The Sun" is experimental to a degree, mixing and melding genres into one another, from the hee-haw country of "Part One Of The Cowboy Trilogy" to the pure pop of "Queue", to the jazzy instrumental "Photosynthesis".

"I think that I do have my own style," he says. "Whatever I do has a little bit of my personality in it."

Most young artists shun "love" as a lyrical theme and most with a famous bloodline keep the object of their affection secret, but Lennon does neither, proudly declaring that "Into The Sun" was inspired by his relationship with Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda.

"I didn't think much about that, honestly. I am also a very personal artist; my art is an extension of my personal life, so I can't really help it. It's just the way that I work."

While the relationship may have been fresh and new and exciting at the time he wrote the songs for "Into The Sun", Lennon, says, "I'm still entreched in it. It's the focus of my life now. I think being in love is the greatest."

Honda actually produced the album because the pair had been working together since before they became lovers. Honda and Miho Hatori, also of Cibo Matto, remixed Yoko Ono's "Talking To The Universe" and when Lennon met the girls, they hit it off. He ended up going on tour with Cibo Matto as their bass player, opening for Boss Hog, Beck, Sonic Youth and Butthole Surfers. "We toured around six or seven times together," says Lennon.

"By the time we made a record, we were figuring out the songs, writing the songs, just the logistics of getting things together in the work place. We live together so we planned the whole thing out. We really did a lot of pre-production at home.

"I demoed the jazz songs on the computer and I said, 'Look I want to have an upright bass, Latin percussion, horns and I want to get a flute player, and she was like, 'Okay, I know these guys.' She would help organize, make sure they wre all available on the same day. Yuka's good at organizing that kind of stuff," says Lennon.

"As a producer, she really just tried to realize what was in my head. She wasn't the type of producer who was like, 'Look, Sean, I know you hear it this way but I think ba ba ba ba.' She was more like 'What do you want?' 'I want this and this.' Okay, let's do that. And we'd do that."

Monday, March 11, 1996

Sean Lennon lives in fear

NEW YORK (AP) -- Sean Lennon has always been afraid he would meet the same fate as his father.

"I grew up afraid somebody was going to shoot my mom or me," the son of murdered Beatle John Lennon says in the March 18 issue of Newsweek.

Lennon, 20, who describes himself as introspective, neurotic and intimidated by everything, conceded that "in New York everybody's afraid of getting shot. I think part of the process is trying to deal with your fear so it doesn't inhibit you."

Lennon is touring with his rock band IMA to promote its album, Rising.

John Lennon was shot to death outside his New York apartment building in 1980.