TS: "Double Fantasy" vs "Milk & Honey"

Milk & Honey is the sound of a barrell being scraped.

Actually, it's far from a scraping-barrel album, as most of those songs were recorded (and intended) as Lennon-Ono's next album.

Regarding "Milk & Honey" I have two main problems about it. One is the unfinishedness of the entire Lennon thing (I mean, "Grow Old With Me" could have been fantastic had he ever been able to finish it), but there is also the Yoko tracks. Sure there are Yoko tracks on "Double Fantasy" too, but the presence of Lennon means they are sort of refined and works out in a way whereas the Yoko tracks on "Milk & Honey" are just terrible and nothing else.

So it's "Double Fantasy" all the way to me. Lennon's most underrated solo album in retrospect, even though I know it sold bucketloads following his death.

Double Fantasy - Yoko wins
Milk & Honey - John wins

I quite like "Grow Old With Me", rough around the edges as it is. Wasn't it scheduled to be the third "comeback" single after "Real Love"?

hmm not sure. the Glen Campbell version of that from last year is pretty nice, works well.

The Lennon tracks on "Double Fantasy" were the best he'd done since "Magical Mystery Tour".

^^ Well, that was a post to end this with for two months.

Geir is a bitter old man, isn't he?

Double Fantasy - Yoko wins
Milk & Honey - John wins

― reallysmoothmusic (Jamie_ATP),

Truth.

double fantasy is a much better album than Milk & Honey for both of them. ON DF, Yoko's songs are incredible, still sound vital; John's songs are polished and smoothe, sure, but assured and very very good (yes, MOR, but you know, really good MOR). Milk and Honey has some good John songs and some throwaways, and I don't remember a thing about the majority of Yoko's songs (which weren't from the same sessions anyway).

So DF wins. One of my favorite albums.

M&H boats "You're The One," a spectacular Yoko ballad with a weird sampled cricket effect and discordant synth. It should've been on Season of Glass.

weird I don't think I have Milk and Honey. But I do have Season of Glass, which is a deeply strange record

btw I got Approximately Infinite Universe last week: woefully uneven but my favorite of her albums.

^^^the high points of that album are unbelievable. "What a Bastard the World Is"!!

The title track, "Yangyang," "I Feel Like Smashing My Face....," "Bastard," "Death of Samantha," "Peter the Dealer" (Yoko does Steely Dan). At least ten killer tracks.

Anyway.

AIU is really really good. It makes the stuff on M&H seem pretty limp.

Season of Glass was kind of cool

On a Yoko binge last week, I gave SOG another listen. It's true: the clinical production and archness of some of her songwriting strophes makes for a weirdly compelling listen.

Speaking of Yoko, I LOVE this jam between her, Lennon, Voorman and Ringo circa POB.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4EVj76htYs

pretty prescient that double fantasy begins with an email notification chime

Giving Double Fantasy some overdue dues: http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/john-lennon-and-yoko-ono-double-fantasy.html

nice

I always liked the production and combination of high piano and vocal on the rather poignant "Grow Old With Me" off M&H, although DF is the better album overall.

i really do love this album (df)

Apparently the Yoko solo catalogue will be reissued this year (according to an article about her birthday concert).

listening to this album for the first time in years, it's kinda striking how dark and dissonant yoko's songs are. you always hear about how critics dismissed this album as this nicey-nicey portrait of a happy perfect marriage but if you listen to all the yoko songs in a row she sounds like she's ready to kill him half the time. and marcello's right about how creepy it is to hear her calling john a 'phony.' whereas john's songs all seem to be floating in this gauze-y fantasy world where yoko hasn't said any of that stuff -- except for 'i'm losing you.' and maybe 'starting over,' which sort of hints that they've been through some rough shit and it's time to move on.

I sang the intro to "(Just Like) Starting Over" to myself while I was driving today. I've always loved it but I never realized how virtuosic it is until I tried to sing the whole thing. I remember him saying that he thought of it as Elvis or Roy Orbison and I know "In Dreams" has a vocal intro that's separate from the rest of the song. If anyone can think of any other '50s songs that do that, I'd be interested to know.

Song also has a great bridge.

I think Double Fantasy is a perfectly great album. I love both Yoko and John's work on it. DF less so; there's something about the sound of it that is off-putting.

so how DO those songs rank?!

The older I get, the more “(Just Like) Starting Over” connects. One of the songs I’ve most positively re-evaluated over the years/decades.

How many Beatles fans who turned Double Fantasy into a #1 hit for weeks after Lennon’s death skipped her tracks? Nine out of ten — I’d bet my mortgage.

one advantage of first hearing this album on cassette: it was harder to skip tracks, so i usually just listened to it all the way through. that was a revelation for a teenage beatles fan, realizing that yoko was actually pretty good.

The piano demos at the end of M&H are great and that may be Lennon's most focused song on either album.

I might like every Yoko song you have under "meh" more than "Your Hands" or "You're the One" (the latter of which seems to go for a similar thing to what "Walking on Thin Ice" accomplishes better, I think).

"Yes, I'm Your Angel" is masterful.

i actually didn't realize "nobody told me" had been written for ringo! it does sound perfect for him.

It was gonna be his contribution to Stop And Smell The Roses, which was being constructed as career reboot with material from Lennon, Maca, and Harrison, who took his song back and rewrote it into "All Those Years Ago", and gave Ringo "Wrack My Brain" instead.

I find the frequency-hit of 'Grow Old With Me' really affecting

As a teenager I used to love Lennon's solo stuff but grew increasingly wary of his navel-gazing and persecution complexes as I got into my twenties. I haven't dared go back to it since, for I fear my toes might curl back so far I break a tendon

haha, looking back at this thread, I've said the same thing four times lol

I see little of those complexes on this material, for better or worse.

I apparently inspired this thread! But never posted on it, so ...

I like Al's list. Is "I'm Steppin' Out' missing? If so, that feels like a worthy "Sound, Solid" entry.

I'm less in love with Yoko's new wave-isms from this era, but "You're the One," with its prominent slap bass, feels like a surprising (but likely unintentional) nod to the demi-immortal "The Voice of Q" from 1982. Meanwhile "Beautiful Boys" is a bit of a hidden gem here, what with the over-the-top Spanish guitar, Star Wars sound fx and Vangelis synths supporting a pretty poignant lyric.

"Woman" is correctly on Al's "Worst Songs Ever" list. It was terrible then, even worse now. Tho I just relistened to "(Just Like) Starting Over" and think that has aged pretty well.

"Nobody Told Me" kind of necessarily lords over everything else on M&H. I was a bit too young to remember anything other than the fact that the mom driving carpool a few times a week had the eight-track in her car, but have to imagine the appearance of a legitimately classic John Lennon single four years after his death was cathartic.

"Nobody Told Me" has never suffered from overplay; maybe it gets play on satellite Beatles radio, but growing up through the early '00s I never heard it like I did the three DF singles.

Therefore, it sounds fresh and crisp.

I saw that video all the time on MTV.

at the time!

Still one of those pavlovian intros. Soon as I'd hear that "Three! Four!" it'd be grainy home movies on the screen for the next three minutes instead of, I dunno, something cool.

Yeah, you’d at least think Lennon would’ve filmed an actual video for the goddamn thing in 1984. Maybe he really was creatively spent.

Is it just me, or does "(Just Like) Starting Over" sound like it was produced by Jeff Lynne?

I love the production on the rest of the album. Very polished, but never overly slick.

Songwriting is excellent too, both John's and Yoko's. "Woman" especially is all kinds of gorgeous.

Woman is breathless cheese, more sappy than My Love or almost any other McCartney song that Lennon made fun of. It is what it is, I think the actual melody line of the song is so strong it kind of overcomes the mawkish production and lyrics.

^ also true. But it's good breathless sappy cheese...

"Woman" will always divide audiences. Growing up, I thought it a Bee Gees song.

oh and i don't find the production mawkish at all. I love those ringing guitar notes on the (unusually wordless) chorus.

'Woman' is one of the first songs I remember hearing, so it's really hard to be objective about it

and yeah this is Lennon's later work to a tee. Not so different to McCartney: Mawkish lyrical content saved by melodies so strong you could be singing about a kitchen mop abd they'd still be good

Lee, are you thinking Out of the Blue era ELO? This stuff never struck me before as sounding like Lynne, but maybe it does. In any case, when Alfred was talking about "Nobody Told Me" as sounding crisp for reasons related to how often it's heard, it struck me that I think a lot of the material, production-wise, is crisp sounding in general.

i've been playing the hell out of milk & honey lately. with the possible exception of "forgive me my little flower princess" (which, in fairness, isn't quite as bad as the horrible title would suggest), all of lennon's songs on here are really strong. i love love love "i'm steppin' out" which just sounds like such a burst of pent-up energy. "i don't wanna face it" sounds almost punk to me -- like alfred says upthread, this song absolutely needs to be covered by more people. and "nobody told me" feels like something lennon was born to write, like a smarter/more cynical take on the kind of anthems he kept trying to write in the early 70s. "grow old with me" probably would have been kinda insufferable in its finished version but something about the fuzzy recording gets me. okay, i don't like "borrowed time" that much. still, pretty impressive!

yoko's songs feel a little slight to me compared to her double fantasy stuff, more like (pleasant) interludes than actual songs. "you're the one" is excellent, though.

apparently "Nobody Told Me" has gotten more airplay during these plague months

my only problem with John's songs on M&H is that the vocals really sound like guide tracks (Other than on Nobody Told Me).

Probably a guide track too; he intended it for Ringo.

Wow, Brad. Superb.

I think I first learned the extent of Rushent's involvement in Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again.

lol wrong thread

nobody told me there was a demo of nobody told me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Q9706Gyy8