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"  Sean Lennon understands people are going to draw comparisons between the music he makes and that created by his famous father. But as he told ELLE.com, that&amp;#039;s exactly how it should be. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s just what art is,&amp;quot; he offered. &amp;quot;Art is absorbing other people&amp;#039;s lives.&amp;quot; Lennon&amp;#039;s latest project, The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, is one he feels extremely passionate about: alongside model-girlfriend Charlotte Kemp-Muhl, Lennon unspools psychedelic, spaced-out tunes on the duo&amp;#039;s new full-length Midnight Sun, out today. While darting through traffic in lower Manhattan, Lennon told us about his super-busy creative life, working with his mom, Yoko Ono, and why he related to a famous kidnapping victim.   I wanted to ask you about one song on the album in particular: &amp;quot;Poor Paul Getty.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s an ode to the grandson of oil tycoon Paul Getty, who was kidnapped for ransom by the Italian mob. I&amp;#039;m guessing you can relate given that you experienced several kidnapping threats when you were younger. Were you aware at the time?   It was crazy. And of course I was aware: When you&amp;#039;re being put into a black bag and being carried by FBI agents or New York City detectives or bodyguards and you&amp;#039;re being carried past a truck that has some crazy person in it who has painted insane John Lennon banners all over it and that&amp;#039;s the person you&amp;#039;re hiding from, of course you&amp;#039;re aware of it. How can you not be? It&amp;#039;s not like you&amp;#039;re living in a bubble. Just cause you&amp;#039;re six years old or seven years old doesn&amp;#039;t mean you&amp;#039;re not aware of it. You&amp;#039;re totally aware of it. It was terrifying and it was weird and it sucked. There&amp;#039;s no other way to explain it.   On a different note: I loved your photos for this album. Is that a part of the process in which you like to take an active role?  It&amp;#039;s more than an active role: we took the photos. I have a collection of Leica lenses and I have a Leica M3 and I&amp;#039;m into cameras and Charlotte likes to take pictures too. So we tend to do all the pictures of our stuff together. And we do that to save money. Because it&amp;#039;s our own label we&amp;#039;re not going to hire some photographer to take a photo when all we really need is to press a button. So we tend to do it ourselves. It&amp;#039;s just easier.   Lastly, I&amp;#039;m curious if you hear similarities between your father&amp;#039;s music and your own?  Of course I hear the similarities. That&amp;#039;s the whole point. I listen to lots of music: Whether it&amp;#039;s Beethoven or Indian classical music or Miles Davis or John Lennon and the Beatles or Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, all of the things that you listen to and that impact your life come through in your music. And that&amp;#039;s great. And then you figure out what it means to you. That&amp;#039;s what creativity is. Anyone who says they&amp;#039;re not influenced by other people&amp;#039;s work is just not a human being. Of course you get influenced by other people. That&amp;#039;s the whole point of making art: to internalize all the things that are great about art to you and then figure out what it means.   Photos: Chimera Music "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/news/a19216/sean-lennon-ghost-of-a-saber-tooth-tiger-interview/>