Julian Lennon: Photograph Smile

Columbia Music/Sony

Playing Time: 64:36

D. Malcolm Fairbrother

It must seem strange to Julian Lennon to stride onto the stage of public perception after a seven-year interval between CDs, the echoes of an era-defining music lingering in his memory. All too well has he known the price of being the progeny of such a famous father as John Lennon. One must confront the irresolvable dilemma: there are constant voices who ascribe any success you might grasp to your father's name, muttering that your talent and your accomplishments are just muted shadows of all that your father was, all that your father did. Sometimes, the voices come from within.

Undeniably, doors were opened for Julian that are impenetrable for most fledgling artists. He released four CDs with varying degrees of success, receiving a pressure-inducing and somewhat premature Grammy nomination for his first work, Valotte. Indifference by critics, audience, or both, came for his next three releases, The Secret Value of Daydreaming, Mr. Jordan, and Help Yourself, this resulting in abandonment by his record company. Now he returns after some significant downtime with the stunning, yet schizophrenic, Photograph Smile.

Photograph Smile is co-produced superbly by Lennon and Bob Rose. The CD sounds wonderful; each track strives to intrigue and engage the listener, yet never do the producers resort to artificial contrivances to distract from the material. Crisp production values are realized by a synthesis of various instruments, from the standard lead, rhythm and bass guitars, to the more exotic bazooki and sitar. All are handled with aplomb.

Strings are applied to Day After Day, and Believe, underscoring themes of romance or melancholy without burying the vocals or other musical components. Wisps of psychedelic swirls flavour rather than dominate the mood of songs such as Crucify, with its I Am the Walrus-like orchestral moans, and Way to Your Heart, a love song co-written by Lennon with Lisa Dalbello. Here, the bridge pays direct and unabashed homage to father Lennon's Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Well, why not? Didn't Julian give papa the title of that classic in the first place? His position on that bridge is well defended.

The fourteen tracks are primarily personal and introspective, ranging from the adequate to the entertainingly good. Cold, with its desolate yet powerful pleading, entertains and moves. Like many of the songs on this opus, it induces a more compelling effect with each repetition. Walls builds from a melodic piano riff into a powerfully optimistic love song, its warmth radiating from an increasingly layered chorus and a smooth horizon of strings.

Lennon penned four of the tracks on this set. On two of these, he fares quite well. Believe is a smart, unpretentious ballad, while Faithful is the CD's strongest, most positive statement. It is an ode to fidelity (are we listening, father?) that swoops and soars into a catchy chorus. Lennon splits the writing almost equally with Mark Spiro and pianist Greg Darling, each tandem producing some memorable moments.

An eerily schizophrenic aura inundates this work from the packaging to the music. The CD is dedicated to Lennon's step-father, the late Roberto Bassanini, picture included; yet, the cover photo shows a happy Julian as a child with a ghostly figure in the background...that hat...that pose...could it be John? How curious, given that Julian designed the package himself.

This strangeness is most evident in the wry echoes of familiarity found in the song titles. I Should Have Known falls one word short of father's classic; it is certainly not better, although it is a crisp and tough ballad. Crucified inherits irony from John's famous "more popular than Jesus" comment and the chorus of his The Ballad of John and Yoko. To suggest Lennon the younger has subconsciously drawn pictures using the colors of his father's palette, is to deny him his witty intelligence. It is also to deny that he has been conflicted by his past.

Julian Lennon has faced his ghosts and earned his place at this moment in his life. He has battled the evil step-mother in the courts for his rightful share of his father's estate and used some of this money to craft what he has called his first work that is true to his artistic vision. And now, he has listened to the echoes of that by-gone era and contemplated the shadows of the Sixties; but realizing that they are nothing of more substance than echoes and shadows, he has stepped into the present to create a solid addition to his body of work. There are others on the road that come from similar circumstances, and who face the pitfalls as they balance between progeny and prodigy: Sean Ono Lennon, Rufus Wainwright, Jakob Dylan, Adam Cohen, among others. They can all learn lessons from the one who went through it before, from his failures as well as his successes.

Somewhere, the ghost of a father is smiling at the elegantly grounded man his son is becoming.