The Number Ones: The Beatles' “Hey Jude”
“Hey Jude” remains the Beatles’ biggest-ever hit, the one that stayed at #1 for the longest. It’s also a document of the moment that the band finally started coming apart for good. And from at least one perspective, it’s a song about that fracture — one band member wishing a warm and only slightly premature farewell to his greatest collaborator.
In the spring of 1968, John Lennon separated from his wife Cynthia, leaving her for Yoko Ono. Paul McCartney felt bad for Julian, John’s five-year-old son. He went to visit Cynthia and Julian, to check in on them. And when he was on that trip, he came up with the idea for “Hey Jude,” thinking of it as “Hey Jules” at first. (He ultimately liked the name “Jude” better.) Julian didn’t learn until he was a teenager that the song was about him, but he also has memories of being closer with McCartney than he was with his own father.
So McCartney, by most accounts, wrote “Hey Jude” to comfort Julian. But John Lennon heard something else in the song. Years later in interviews, Lennon said that he thought the song was about him — that it was Paul giving him his blessing to go off with Ono and to leave the band behind him. For that matter, Paul McCartney had only just broken up with his longtime girlfriend Jane Asher and taken up instead with his future wife Linda Eastman. So maybe he was singing the song to himself.
Source: Tom Breihan /stereogum.com
