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.
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.
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]
