Hey Jude by The Beatles: what the song really means

A drive to Weybridge

John and Cynthia Lennon separated in May 1968. The following month Paul McCartney drove out to Kenwood, the family house in Weybridge, to see Cynthia and her son Julian, who was five. Cynthia remembered what happened on the way. "On the journey down he composed 'Hey Jude' in the car."

McCartney's reason was plain enough. "I knew it was not going to be easy for him," he said of the boy. He also disliked the idea that people he had known for years should simply drop out of his life because a marriage had ended.

So it did not begin as a single, or as a seven-minute record, or as a chorus for stadiums. It began as something to bring to the door. (Wikipedia)

Why Jules became Jude

It was called "Hey Jules" first, after the boy it was for. McCartney changed one letter, and his explanation is as unceremonious as songwriting explanations get: "because I thought that sounded a bit better." He has also said he had the name in his ear already, from a character called Jud in Oklahoma!.

A tiny edit, and the only one that really mattered. "Jules" is a message to one child. "Jude" is a name a stranger can sing without ever knowing whose it was. (Anthology, via The Beatles Bible)

The man who thought it was about him

John Lennon heard the song as his own. In his last major interview, in 1980, he said: "But I always heard it as a song to me." Yoko Ono had just arrived in his life, and he read the song's urging to go and find her as McCartney quietly giving him leave to go. By his own account the generous half of Paul was blessing the new relationship while the other half did not want to lose a writing partner.

McCartney's answer, when Lennon put it to him, was that he had written the song about himself.

Critics have added their own readings. Mark Hertsgaard hears much of the lyric as aimed at "a grown man on the verge of a powerful new love". Tim Riley hears a song about self-worth, in which a man sets out to console somebody else, finds himself weighing his own feelings instead, and sings himself into belief across the closing refrains.

None of those readings corrects the others, and that is the interesting part. A song written at one address, for one frightened child, turned out to have room in it for the man who was leaving, the man who wrote it, and everyone who has ever sung the end of it in a room full of strangers. (Wikipedia; The Beatles Bible)

Seven minutes that should not have worked

The Beatles ran at it for 25 takes at EMI Studios on 29 and 30 July 1968, and treated every one of them as a rehearsal. The master was cut at Trident Studios on 31 July, with overdubs the following day, because Trident had an eight-track machine and EMI had four. It was the first Beatles song put down on eight-track.

George Martin produced it and scored the ending for a 36-piece orchestra. The finished record runs 7:12, and roughly four of those minutes are the coda: the same refrain, nineteen times round.

By the commercial logic of 1968 that is all wrong. Radio wanted three minutes and a fade. Instead it went to number one in America and stayed there for nine weeks, tying the longest run at the top anyone had managed at that point, and sold something like eight million copies. The least efficient four minutes on the record are the four everybody can still sing. (Wikipedia)

The boy found out twenty years later

Julian Lennon did not know the song was his for almost twenty years. "Paul and I used to hang about quite a bit, more than Dad and I did," he has said, which is a quietly devastating sentence about a childhood.

In 1996 McCartney's recording notes for the song came up at a London auction. Julian bought them for £25,000, and spent a further £35,000 at the same sale on his father's memorabilia. His manager John Cousins explained the motive at the time: "He is collecting for personal reasons. These are family heirlooms, if you like."

He had to buy the paperwork for the song that was written for him. (Wikipedia; American Songwriter)

What it means to write a song for one person

Almost nobody gets a number one written at their front door, and that is not really the point of the story. The point is what McCartney's instinct was. Faced with a five-year-old having the worst month of his short life, he did not send a message or wait for a better moment. He made him something, in a car, on the way there.

Julian got his song decades late, and then paid to keep the piece of paper it was written on. Most of the people we would write a song for are easier to reach than that.

So: who would you write one for? Tell us the name. Do not leave it twenty years.