John Lennon

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Mind Games is John Lennon's fourth post-Beatles album, and was recorded and released in 1973. Like his previous album, the politically topical and somewhat abrasive Some Time in New York City, Mind Games was poorly received by music critics. It reached No. 13 in the UK and No. 9 in the US, where it went gold.

The album was recorded at the beginning of Lennon's 18-month separation from Yoko Ono.

In mid-1973, as Yoko Ono was completing her fourth album, Feeling the Space, Lennon decided he also wanted to record a new album. He liked the musicians assembled for Ono's album by their assistant and production coordinator, May Pang, and he asked Pang to book them for his sessions. Lennon then quickly wrote the songs for Mind Games.

Just as the sessions were to get under way in June at New York's Record Plant Studios, the Lennons separated. With Ono's approval, Pang would become Lennon's companion and lover in what would become an 18-month relationship known as Lennon's 'lost weekend'. Lennon's design for the Mind Games sleeve represented his symbolic walking away from Ono and her apparent mountainous influence on him.

Under the incarnation of 'The Plastic U.F.Ono Band', Lennon engaged the services of session drummer Jim Keltner, guitarist David Spinozza, Gordon Edwards on bass, Arthur Jenkins on percussion, and the vocal backing of a group called Something Different. Lennon produced the album without the aid of Phil Spector.

The tone of this album ranges from somber and melodic songs directed to Ono ("Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)", "One Day at a Time", "Out The Blue", and "You Are Here"), to more light-hearted and optimistic tracks ("Intuition", "Only People") and a few that indulge Lennon's affinity for pure rock 'n' roll ("Tight A$" and "Meat City").

The title track (with its "love is the answer" refrain and call to "make love not war") was begun during the Beatles' Let It Be sessions, and became a Top 20 US hit.

"Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)", "Only People" and the three-second silent "Nutopian International Anthem" were the only political tracks on the album. The latter referred to “Nutopia: The Country of Peace”, a conceptual country which the Lennons had announced at a press conference in New York City on April Fool's Day 1973.

Mind Games's closer, "Meat City", contains a Lennon curse, ("Fuck a pig!"), sped up and backwards-masked, while the mix used as "Mind Games"'s single B-Side gives the same treatment to the phrase "Check the album!"

Rolling Stone magazine assessed the album as "his worst writing yet" and found Lennon to be "helplessly trying to impose his own gargantuan ego upon an audience ... waiting hopefully for him to chart a new course".

Writing for Allmusic, critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote of the album ; "While the best numbers are among Lennon's finest, there's only a handful of them, and the remainder of the record is simply pleasant."

All songs written and composed by John Lennon.
Side one 
 
1.  "Mind Games"    4:13
2.  "Tight A$"    3:37
3.  "Aisumasen (I'm Sorry)"    4:44
4.  "One Day (At a Time)"    3:09
5.  "Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)"    4:12
6.  "Nutopian International Anthem"    0:03

Side two 
 
7.  "Intuition"    3:08
8.  "Out the Blue"    3:23
9.  "Only People"    3:23
10.  "I Know (I Know)"    3:49
11.  "You Are Here"    4:08
12.  "Meat City"    2:45