Composition and Music
Lennon composed "Imagine" one morning in early 1971, on a Steinway grand piano, in a bedroom at his Tittenhurst Park estate in Ascot, England. Ono watched as he composed the melody, chord structure and almost all the lyrics, nearly completing the song in one brief writing session. Urish and Bielen criticised the song's instrumental music as overly sentimental and melodramatic, comparing it to the music of the prerock era and describing the vocal melody as understated. Blaney described the song's melody as "apparently incomplete ... a simple motif that cries out to be developed and extended."
Lennon wrote "Imagine" in the key of C major. Its 4-bar piano introduction begins with a C chord then moves to Cmaj7 before changing to F; the 12-bar verses also follow this chord progression, with their last 4 bars moving from Am/E to Dm and Dm/C, finishing with G, G11 then G7, before resolving back to C. The 8-bar choruses progress from F to G to C, then Cmaj7 and E before ending on E7, a C chord substituted for E7 in the final bar. The 4-bar outro begins with F, then G, before resolving on C. With a duration of 3 minutes and 3 seconds and a time signature of 4/4, the song's tempo falls around 75 beats per minute.
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