In an interview in 1971, John Lennon described ‘Hey Jude’ as McCartney’s “best song”. According to John, the track had started off “as a song about my son Julian because Paul was going to see him. Then he turned it into ‘Hey Jude.’ I always thought it was about me and Yoko.”
He would go on to declare that he thought the song contained a hidden message and that it was something of a confessional. “I always heard it as a song to me,” he told Playboy in 1980. “‘Hey, John.’ Subconsciously, he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all, because he didn’t want to lose his partner.”
But Paul would go on to confirm that the song was in fact written to comfort a five-year-old son Julian after John’s divorce from his then-wife Cynthia. 20 years later.
In 1987, Julian bumped into Paul in New York, where they were both staying in the same hotel. Paul sat down with him and revealed the inspiration behind the song. Julian was vocal about his difficult relationship with his father and openly admitted to being closer with Paul growing up.
Julian once recalled their meeting in New York and described how “Paul told me he’d been thinking about my circumstances, about what I was going through and what I’d have to go through. Paul and I used to hang out quite a bit – more than Dad and I did… There seem to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing at that age than me and Dad. I’ve never really wanted to know the truth of how Dad was and how he was with me. There was some very negative stuff — like when he said that I’d come out of a whisky bottle on a Saturday night. That’s tough to deal with. You think, where’s the love in that? It surprises me whenever I hear the song. It’s strange to think someone has written a song about you. It still touches me.”
Julian once recalled their meeting in New York and described how “Paul told me he’d been thinking about my circumstances, about what I was going through and what I’d have to go through. Paul and I used to hang out quite a bit – more than Dad and I did… There seem to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing at that age than me and Dad. I’ve never really wanted to know the truth of how Dad was and how he was with me. There was some very negative stuff — like when he said that I’d come out of a whisky bottle on a Saturday night. That’s tough to deal with. You think, where’s the love in that? It surprises me whenever I hear the song. It’s strange to think someone has written a song about you. It still touches me.”
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