Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions

Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions is the second of three experimental albums by John Lennon and Yoko Ono which conceptually documents their life together.

Following Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, Life with the Lions is a focused on the frenzy of media attention Ono and Lennon’s relationship had received. It heavily features Yoko’s tremolo wailings but in contrast to Two Virgins adds in Lennon’s freeform guitar feedback as a backdrop. The name of the albums is a wry play on an old British radio program Life with the Lyons juxtaposing the media storm the couple received.

It was released in 1969, the same year that The Beatles released Abbey Road and Yellow Submarine.

The album begins with a live performance by Yoko and John at Cambridge University which took up the entire side of the original vinyl. Side B begins with “No Bed for Beatle John” and a simultaneous reading of newspaper clipping of Yoko’s hospitalization, the scandal of their previous work Two Virgins and John’s divorce of his first wife Cynthia. “Baby’s Heartbeat” is a loop of their miscarried child’s heartbeat in utero, which is followed by a literal two minutes of (audio) silence which is reminiscent of Yoko’s contemporary John Cage’s seminal work “4:33”, but contextually informed heavily by the previous track. The final two tracks being additions added later, Life with the Lions closes with “Radio Play,” where a radio dial is played with as though it were an instrument while various background sounds and splices of conversation add texture to the overall track.