It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
Studio album by Yoko Ono
Released	2 November 1982 (1982-11-02) [1]
Studio	The Hit Factory, New York City
Genre	Pop new wave
Length	36:43
Label	Polygram
Producer	Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono chronology
Season of Glass (1981) It's Alright (I See Rainbows) (1982) Milk and Honey (1984)
Singles from It's Alright (I See Rainbows)
" My Man" Released: 1 November 1982 (US); [1] 26 November 1982 (UK) [1] " Never Say Goodbye" Released: 25 January 1983 (US) [1]

It's Alright (I See Rainbows) is the sixth solo album by Yoko Ono, and her second release after the murder of husband John Lennon. As a variation of a theme concerning its predecessor, the back cover features a transparent image of Lennon in a then-contemporary photo of Yoko and Sean, depicted in Central Park. Released in 1982, all songs were written, composed, arranged, produced, and sung by Ono. It charted at #98 in the US.

Background

The album saw Yoko take her music in a more uplifting direction following 1981's Season of Glass, despite the "bulk" of the album's songs "deal[ing] with her unabated feelings of loss over Lennon." ^[2]

Yoko reflected on the making of the album when writing liner notes for the 1992 boxset Onobox:

The songs from It’s Alright were an attempt to do new sounds. I used shotguns for the backbeat. I brought Sean’s toy raygun to the studio to use it as a rhythm track. I was expecting the usual sneer I had gotten from the musicians and engineers whenever I had tried to do anything that was out of the ordinary. Surprisingly, no one was upset this time. It was ’82 and it seemed as though I was finally in sync with the world.

[...]

In a way, the It's Alright time was much more difficult for me as a woman, as a person, than when I had made Season Of Glass. Life went on. I had to walk and talk normally, while I knew that somewhere inside me there was a clock that had stopped in ’80.

— Yoko Ono, "ONOBOX by Yoko Ono". 23 April 2009.

In 1997, the album was remastered by Ono and Rob Stevens for release on CD by Rykodisc. ^[3] The 1997 release used newly remixed versions of all songs. Some of the original mixes had a CD release in 1992 on the Onobox set but the rest remain unreleased on CD to date.

Reception

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[4]
Rolling Stone	[2]

Billboard called it Ono's "most commercially accessible musical effort." ^[5] Writing for Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder noted its "committed and convincing avant-gardism", which produced a "synthesizer-based pop that’s more adventurous than much of the music currently being ground out by Europersons half her age." ^[2]

Track listing

All songs written by Yoko Ono.

Personnel

• Yoko Ono – vocals
• Paul Griffin – keyboards, synthesizer, piano
• Pete Cannarozzi – synthesizer
• Gordon Grody, Kurt Yahjihan, Carlos Alomar – background vocals
• Elliott Randall, Steve Love, Hugh McCracken, John Lennon, John Tropea – guitar
• Michael Holmes, Paul Shaffer – keyboards
• Neil Jason, Tony Levin, Wayne Pedziwiatr – bass guitar
• Yogi Horton, Allan Schwartzberg – drums
• Rubens Bassini, David A. Freedman, Sammy Figueroa, Roger Squitero – percussion
• Badal Roy – tabla
• Howard Johnson – baritone saxophone, tuba

Technical

• Brian McGee, John Davenport, Jon Smith – engineer
• Bob Gruen – photography

Charts

Release history

References