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Sean Ono Lennon and his girlfriend Charlotte Kemp Muhl have announced the birth of their baby boy.
The couple shared their news to social media on Tuesday evening (1 September) along with a photo of them holding their son – John Lennon’s first grandchild – in coordinating black and white outfits.
Sean, the son of the late John Lennon and Yoko Ono, captioned the post with the news that he and Muhl, 39, had “created a Human Bean!”.
“His name is Aurelius!” the 50-year-old revealed. “Thank you!”
The name Aurelius comes from the Latin for “golden” or “gilded”, and symbolises splendour, radiance and the sun. The Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last emperor of the Pax Romana, a period of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire that lasted between 27 BC to 180 AD.
Sean, a musician and producer, shared further photos of him and Muhl holding their son. He captioned one of Muhl: “Baby Momma!”
Muhl also shared photos to her social media, including several of her carrying Aurelias in a baby harness while walking in the water, and a picture of him sleeping.
“We made a human!” she captioned her post. “Am convinced DNA is agentic alien quaternary code. The sleep-deprivation only adds to the surrealism… Burping technique tips welcome. Been playing him Aphex Twin and Stravinsky. Meconium is crazy.”
A number of the couple’s famous friends were among those to congratulate the happy couple. “Oh [Sean] I’m so happy for you both,” Patti Smith wrote.
“Congratulations on your new baby,” Paris Hilton said, while Willow Smith commented with a crying face emoji, a heart and prayer hands.
Sean and Muhl, a musician and model, have been together since 2007, after first meeting at Coachella festival in 2005.
“We didn’t wind up hanging out for a couple of years,” Sean told MusicRadar in 2010. “We developed our relationship through writing letters, postcards and emails, and it made our relationship stronger in the long run.”
The pair had been dating for a year when Sean heard Muhl play a song she’d written with a friend when they were children: “I was really surprised at how good it was,” he recalled, “So I said, ‘Well, why don’t we try writing some songs together?’”
They have collaborated on a number of music projects, including the band The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, named after a play Muhl wrote when she was seven.
Sean has also released four solo albums and five with his mother Ono, 93, as well as three with the psych-rock band the Claypool Lennon Delirium.
As a producer, he has credits on albums including Lana Del Rey’s 2017 record Lust for Life, which features his duet with her, “Tomorrow Never Came”.
Speaking to The Independent last year, he discussed being the caretaker of his father’s legacy, along with that of his mother, Yoko.
“I first was interested in music because of my dad,” he said. “I always felt like music was a way of getting closer to him.” He also revealed that he spends time living with Yoko and endeavours to protect her privacy: “She doesn’t want to do press and she’s not interested in being a public figure anymore.”
“It’s funny,” he continued. “People always talk about how I have grown up in the shadow of my dad – which is true, but my mum really did. She had a thriving art career, and then as soon as she got together with my dad, that sort of went out the window for a while.
“People think about how Beatles fans didn’t accept Yoko, but the avant garde fans didn’t accept The Beatles! The modern art community was very snobby about rock and roll.”