“Friendly Fire”
from the album Friendly Fire
2006
Into the Sun, Sean Lennon’s 1998 debut, was the casually jazzy album of a young New York celebrity with the talents and the means to explore any sort of music that piqued his wide-ranging 22-year-old curiosities. Then he split with his longtime girlfriend after she cheated on him with his best friend; a year and a half later, Lennon’s best friend died in a motorcycle accident, without Lennon reconciling with him. These events have yielded an album of angry, guilty, sad — and often stunningly pretty — songs. Relying on a four-piece rock band instead of parts he overdubbed himself, Lennon maintains an ornamented, deliberate style as persuasively as his debut album jumped around. Songs like “Dead Meat” are strong meshes of smooth lyrics and melody that are based in the great tradition of Beatlesque pop tunes. Even more pronounced than the influence of Lennon’s dad’s band is the shadow of Fiona Apple: Like her music, Lennon’s songs, with their rocked-up theater and easy cerebral nature, make complex emotions sing.
“I lfet you standing, standing in the dark,” Lennon confessed in the ruined, climatic ballad “Falling Out of Love.” His viola-toned voice, with its patient, Brazilian-like delivery, is sweet and distinctive. Lennon sounds strangely liberated by this album’s unfortunate back story, as if the anguish of it overcame his anxieties about being John Lennon‘s son. Consider “All You Need is Love” the starting place — it’s just that things get complicated after that.
I think that Sean’s Debut, into the sun, really brought him to an abrupt stop because he wanted to wait for the music to come to him. Then, after eight years, he finally says that this was all just a bad idea and went to writing his huge hit “dead meat” in the album “Friendly Fire”. I just hope that he won’t dive into a de je vu run and ten years later write another hit from the “soul”.