Lyric Of The Week: The Beatles, “Julia”
Songs by rock artists about their mothers are relatively few and far between. Those that there are tend to go to one of two extremes. You’ll get the occasional gushing tribute, a la Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wish.” On the flip side of that coin are the rockers who take umbrage with the way they were raised, such as Roger Waters in Pink Floyd’s scathing “Mother.”
“Julia”, by The Beatles, falls somewhere in between, a kind of impressionistic meditation by an earthbound man on the ethereal presence of a woman calling to him yet hovering out of his reach. Or at least that’s how it sounds removed from any context. In actuality, the man, John Lennon, was writing the song as an indirect tribute to his deceased mother Julia, which makes this one of the more oddly fascinating entries into this subgenre of music.
For those who don’t know the backstory, Lennon’s mother was only a sporadic part of his life once his father left the family when John was an infant. The two got closer in Lennon’s teenage years, but that ended abruptly in 1958 when Julia, while crossing a street, was hit by a car and killed.
By: Jim Beviglia
Source: American Songwriter
