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Powerful, poignant, important, and beautiful are all words that describe Imagine – both the title song and the LP that was John Lennon’s second solo album release, in the autumn of 1971. One song does not make a great album, even when it is as seminal and defining as Imagine… and, make no mistake, this is a great album, full of brilliant songs, with great hooks. With John’s acerbic wit ever-present, though, the album never approaches the kind of music that John found irrelevant and meaningless. John began work on the album that was to become Imagine a little over three months after finishing John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Recording his new album was done in three separate stages, the first between February 11 and 16, followed by another from May 24 to 28, before some final overdubs and mixing in New York over the 4th of July weekend. The earlier sessions were at Abbey Road and the May sessions were at the Lennon’s home studio at Tittenhurst Park, the New York sessions in July were at the Record Plant. Faithfully remixed from the ground up by triple Grammy® Award winning engineer Paul Hicks at Abbey Road Studios under the supervision of Yoko Ono Lennon, using high-definition 24-96 audio transfers of the original first generation multi-track recordings, these Ultimate Mixes reveal whole new levels of sonic depth, definition and clarity. "Yoko was very keen that these Ultimate Mixes should achieve three things – to be totally faithful and respectful to the originals, be generally sonically clearer overall and should increase the clarity of John’s vocals. ‘It’s about John’ she said. And she was right. His voice brings the biggest emotional impact to the album [...] The Imagine recordings were an absolute joy to work with. They are great songs in the hands of superb musicians who really know how to make their instruments sound sonically good and how to play collaboratively. John & Yoko had hired very skilled and experienced sound engineers who used high quality equipment and knew how to mic and record onto tape with great expertise, so the technical quality of the recordings was also excellent. Many of those mics are so good they are still in use today." - Paul Hicks (Engineeer)