The Beatles HEY JUDE

This song, recorded by The Beatles in 1968, and originally titled ‘Hey Jules’, was written by McCartney to comfort John Lennon’s son, Julian, during his parents’ divorce. Julian discovered the song had been written for him almost twenty years later. He remembered being closer to McCartney than to his father: ‘Paul and I used to hang about quite a bit more than Dad and I did. We had a great friendship going and there seems to be far more pictures of me and Paul playing together at that age than there are pictures of me and my dad.’ Although McCartney originally wrote the song for Julian, John thought it had actually been written for him: ‘I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it… Yoko had just come into the picture. He’s saying. ‘Hey, Jude—Hey, John.’ I know I’m sounding like one of those fans who reads things into it, but you can hear it as a song to me. Subconsciously, he was saying, ‘Go ahead, leave me.’ On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead at all.’