By John Lennon, 2000

Double Fantasy is an album released by John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono in 1980. Though greeted with mixed reviews upon its release, the album took on a poignancy following Lennon's murder three weeks after its release. It went on to become a worldwide commercial success, winning the 1981 Album of the Year at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards.

Following the birth of his son Sean in 1975, Lennon had put his career on hold to raise him. After five years of little musical activity aside from recording the occasional demo in his apartment in New York, Lennon felt ready to resume work. He was quoted as saying that when making the album, his ambition was to "do something as good as Heroes", the 1977 album by David Bowie.

In the summer of 1980, Lennon made a sailing trip through treacherous waters from Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda. Almost losing his life in that journey, he began to write new songs, occasionally reworking the earlier demos. He stated that he was the most content he had ever felt in all his years and he celebrated this and the love for his family in the lyrics of his new work.

Ono also wrote many songs, inspired with new confidence after Lennon had stated that he believed that contemporary popular music such as the B-52's "Rock Lobster" bore similarities to Ono's earlier work. The couple decided to release their work on the same album, the first time they had done so since 1972's politically-charged Some Time in New York City. In stark contrast to that album, Double Fantasy (subtitled A Heart Play) was a collection of songs wherein husband and wife would conduct a musical dialogue.

The album took its title from a species of freesia, seen in the Bermuda Botanical Gardens, whose name Lennon regarded as a perfect description of his marriage to Ono. Ono approached producer Jack Douglas, with whom both Lennon and she had worked before, and gave him Lennon's demos to listen to. “My immediate impressions were that I was going to have a hard time making it better than the demos because there was such intimacy in the demos,” Douglas told Uncut's Chris Hunt in 2005.

They produced dozens of songs, enough to fill Double Fantasy and a large part of a projected second album, Milk and Honey. Douglas brought Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos of the band Cheap Trick to play on Lennon's "I'm Losing You" and Ono's "I'm Moving On", but were eventually re-recorded with the studio musicians.

(The Cheap Trick version of "I'm Losing You" was included on the John Lennon Anthology collection released in 1998. Unimpressed with its cosy domesticity, critical reaction to the album was largely scathing—"a self-obsessed disaster" according to one reviewer. However, radio airplay for Lennon's "comeback" was steady.

Three weeks after the album's release, Lennon was murdered and many of the poor reviews were withdrawn from publication. In the UK album charts, the album had peaked at #14 then slipped to #46 whilst in the US, the album had slowly risen to #11. Upon Lennon's murder, the album jumped to #1 in the US chart, where it stayed for eight weeks and in the UK, it jumped to #2, where it remained for seven weeks before finally spending two weeks at #1.

In 1982, Douglas, Lennon and Ono won the 1981 Album of the Year for Double Fantasy at the 24th Annual Grammy Awards. In 1989 the album was ranked #29 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s. In 2010, a two-CD set called Double Fantasy Stripped Down, which included a newly remastered copy of the original album along with an alternative version of the album featuring simpler arrangements, was released.

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