Sean Lennon may have initially rejected the astrology his family embraced growing up, but when it came to his new album, it felt like the very stars were against him. “I just felt like there was too much cosmic interference,” he tells Rolling Stone of Asterisms, a genreless wash of instrumental music that flirts with jazz, rock, and electronic. In the end, though, the planets aligned, and the record dropped Friday on John Zorn’s Tzadik label.
As for the album title — a term used to describe shapes in the sky, like constellations — it drew largely on Lennon’s astrological upbringing. “Astrology was infused into every aspect of our lives. Mysticism was a part of how we related to the world,” he says, adding that he rebelled against it as a young man, much like those raised Catholic shun the church.
“I liked the idea as well because my mother raised me in the religion of astrology,” he says. “And I have a lot of complex and kind of bittersweet feelings about that. So, to me, [the title] kind of symbolizes something about my relationship with my mother — this idea of seeing patterns that are there but might not be there at the same time. I don’t want to sound pretentious, but to me, it just represents something about the nature of reality and life and how fleeting it is — how illusory. I liked the idea of shapes that are permanent in the sky but also aren’t really anything at all.”
