How Sean Ono Lennon Defied the Stars to Make His Next Album
Sean Ono Lennon may have initially rejected the astrology his family embraced growing up, but when it came to his new album, it felt like the very stars were against him. “I just felt like there was too much cosmic interference,” he tells Rolling Stone of Asterisms, a genreless wash of instrumental music that flirts with jazz, rock, and electronic. In the end, though, the planets aligned, and the record dropped Friday on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.
But back in the days when Covid was rampant, the fate of the five-song suite was up in the proverbial air. Lennon initially composed the record for a week-long residency at Zorn’s New York venue, the Stone — an event that was postponed several times before he finally took the stage in October 2022 with drummer Ches Smith (John Zorn), bassist/guitarist Devin Hoff (Julia Holter, Sharon Van Etten, Cibo Matto), keyboardists Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto) and Joao Nogueira (Claypool Lennon Delirium), guitarist Julian Lage, and trumpeter Michael Leonhart (Steely Dan). Even then, Lennon had to cancel the final show in the series after he came down with Covid. “That was the first show I’ve ever had to cancel in my life,” he says.
Leading up to the gigs, however, Lennon began sharing demos with Zorn — wordless musings about his life, the state of the world, and his aging mother, Yoko Ono. Instrumental and strange, the album’s closest analog is perhaps ’70s plant music impresario Mort Garson. And that makes sense — Lennon has tinkered with experimental music in the past with his mother (as well as trippy indie film scores) and progged out with Les Claypool in the Claypool Lennon Delirium. And although he cops to being a latecomer to jazz (a particularly salacious Miles Davis biography turned him on), he’s a fan of weirder corners of the genre, like Davis’ avant-garde 1969 release Bitches Brew.
“The whole world was being upheaved with Covid and the lockdowns. Personally, I felt that I had to take care of my mother because she was getting older, and I didn’t want her to get Covid,” he says of his mindstate while writing the record. “So during that time, I was thinking very much about my whole life, you know, looking at my mother being older and the whole world being turned upside down. So I was feeling very pensive.”
Lennon ended up recording Asterisms at his upstate New York studio with Smith, Honda, Leonhart, Hoff, Nogueira, and percussionist Mauro Refosco (Atoms for Peace). Lage had to bow out due to a family issue, which almost derailed the album once again until Wilco‘s Nels Cline suggested Lennon play the guitar himself. “The hero’s journey of this whole story is, when I thought all was lost, Nels came like Obi-Wan and said, you know, ‘Young Padawan’ — or not so young, middle-aged — ‘you should you should try taking up the lightsaber yourself,'” he recalls.
As for the album title — a term used to describe shapes in the sky, like constellations — it drew largely on Lennon’s astrological upbringing. “Astrology was infused into every aspect of our lives. Mysticism was a part of how we related to the world,” he says, adding that he rebelled against it as a young man, much like those raised Catholic shun the church.
“I liked the idea as well because my mother raised me in the religion of astrology,” he says. “And I have a lot of complex and kind of bittersweet feelings about that. So, to me, [the title] kind of symbolizes something about my relationship with my mother — this idea of seeing patterns that are there but might not be there at the same time. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but to me, it just represents something about the nature of reality and life and how fleeting it is — how illusory. I liked the idea of shapes that are permanent in the sky but also aren’t really anything at all.”
As he approaches 50, though, Lennon admits that he doesn’t have it all figured out — despite not wholly believing patterns in the sky are responsible for our destinies. “The older I get, the less confident I feel about anything,” he says. “I have a lot more respect for anybody who finds anything useful, or productive or helpful. I think about how my mother views the world. I have not navigated the world better than anybody. So I’m in no position to judge.”