Season of Glass (Reissue)

In honor of Yoko Ono’s 93rd birthday, and to mark the 35th anniversary of its release, Secretly Canadian announced today that Ono’s seminal 1981 album Season of Glass will be released in summer 2026, in expanded CD and digital versions, and, for the first time in more than forty-five years, on black vinyl, with expanded and enhanced artwork.

One of Pitchfork’s Top 200 albums of the 1980s, Season of Glass was released in June 1981, just seven months after the senseless murder of Ono’s husband and creative partner, John Lennon. Full of songs about love, loss, anger and fear, the album reflected Ono’s experience in stark detail, creating almost a companion piece to Ono and Lennon’s 1970 Plastic Ono Band “primal scream” albums.

“Season of Glass was really just being me, I suppose,” Ono told Newsweek in 1982. “Sort of, it was like a primal scream in a way; you know, something happened in my life, and I just had to say it. And I think it was therapeutic for me more than anything else. And I was pretty honest, I suppose.”

Ono’s fifth studio album, Season of Glass was also the artist’s most commercially successful to date, cracking the Top 50 on Billboard’s Album Chart, but it was not without controversy.

The album’s cover was a photograph of Lennon’s blood-soaked glasses, just as they were returned to Ono from Roosevelt Hospital after his murder. Though David Geffen, the head of Geffen Records, who had released Ono and Lennon’s Double Fantasy in November 1980, and released the original version of Season of Glass, implored Ono to change the cover, Ono stood her ground.

“The record company called me and said the record shops would not stock the record unless I changed the cover,” Ono wrote in the liner notes to ONOBOX. “I didn’t understand it. Why? They said it was in bad taste. I felt like a person soaked in blood coming into a living room full of people and reporting that my husband was dead, his body was taken away, and the pair of glasses were the only thing I had managed to salvage – and people looking at me saying it was in bad taste to show the glasses to them.”

“I’m not changing the cover,” Ono has recalled telling Geffen. “This is what John is now.”

Backed by the same band that had played on Double Fantasy, the sound of Season of Glass sits in alignment next to that album, which at the time was already considered an artistic triumph for Ono, who was inspiring young artists like the B-52s and Sonic Youth.

Following the release of the hit single “Walking on Thin Ice,” the song Ono and Lennon were working on the night Lennon was murdered, and one of the bonus tracks included in the CD and digital versions of Season of Glass, the album was embraced by critics and fans alike.

Publications from both sides of the Atlantic praised the album, noting that Ono was “writing and performing outstanding material” in a voice that was “strident, assured and confident.” The then-current dean of music criticism, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice, wrote that “damn near every song is affecting.” Meanwhile, Rolling Stone gave it four stars, calling it Ono’s “most accessible, assured work,” praising the album for blending emotional, raw expressions of grief and rage with intelligent pop that was nothing short of a remarkable, albeit painful, artistic statement.

In the years since its release, the honest, loving, sometimes harrowing nature of the songs on Season of Glass have meant that it has only gained in stature. Now universally embraced as a powerful artistic statement about grief and loss, it is considered a landmark release, and among Ono’s best works; a fully realized artistic statement.

“Like all my records, this album has a little theme to it,” Ono reflected in a conversation with Rolling Stone in late 1981. “First you say goodbye to sadness, and then there are flashbacks to different aspects of our relationship. After that, you know what happens… And in the end, a woman tries to stand up on her own. It’s my diary, in fact.”