Season of Glass: Vinyl LP

To mark the 45th anniversary of its release, Secretly Canadian has announced that Onos seminal 1981 album Season of Glass will be released July 2026, in expanded CD and digital versions, and on vinyl for the first time in more than forty-five years, with expanded and enhanced artwork. Hit single Walking on Thin Ice is now available to stream everywhere for the first time.

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

Onos fifth studio album, Season of Glass was also the artists most commercially successful to date, cracking the Top 50 on Billboards Album Chart, but it was not without controversy. The albums cover was a photograph of Lennons 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 Lennons 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 didnt 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.

Im not changing the cover, Ono 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.

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 Onos best works; a fully realized artistic statement. Ultimately, Season of Glass is a stunning, cathartic listen. Still, Ono has always insisted theres one thing the album is not: healing.

What healing? Thats another thing most people dont know, but the widows of the world will know, she told the Los Angeles Times nearly a decade after the albums release. Losing a husband is something you cant shake. Its not just a feeling of missing him. Its something more that could never heal. His loss will always stay.

Tracklisting:

SIDE A

1. Goodbye Sadness

2. Mindweaver

3. Even When You’re Far Away

4. Nobody Sees Me Like You Do

5. Turn of the Wheel

6. Dogtown

7. Silver Horse

SIDE B

8. I Don’t Know Why

9. Extension 33

10. No, No, No

11. Will You Touch Me

12. She Gets Down on Her Knees

13. Toyboat

14. Mother of the Universe

15. Walking on Thin Ice

16. I Dont Know Why (demo)

17. Dogtown (alternate version)