Off The Beatle Track

We’ve all heard the story about the genesis of Hey Jude: Paul wrote it to console five-year-old Julian Lennon, whose parents had separated and would eventually divorce. Here’s How Paul tells the story in 2021’s The Lyrics:

The song had started when I was travelling out one day to see Julian and his mother Cynthia. At this point John had left Cynthia, and I was going out to Kenwood as a friend to see hi and see how they were doing. . . . I was thinking about how tough it would be for Jules, as I called him, to have his dad leave him, to have his parents go through a divorce. It started out as a song of encouragement.

Before The Lyrics, the closest we had to a McCartney autobiography (and, of course, neither book is a true autobiography) was Barry Milles’ 1997 Many Years From Now, which quotes Paul extensively. Some details and thoughts appear in one version of the Hey Jude origin story though not the other, but I’d argue that the two versions are essentially consistent.

Hey Jude and Julian

Here’s a headline from he September 22, 2023, edition of USA Today: ‘Hey Jude,’ the sad song Paul McCartney wrote for Julian Lennon is also ‘stark, dark reminder’.” And here’s a subhead from the December 18, 2023, edition of Esquire: “Hey Jude” was written for the son of Beatles legend John Lennon. Fifty-four years later, he released an album called simply Jude.” (That album doesn’t contain a version of Hey Jude, but the cover shows a picture of Julian as a young, Hey Jude-era boy.)

It’s easy to read the first two lines of the song as consolation for Julian:

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.

Take a sad song and make it better.

One can imagine Paul driving (or being driven) to Kenwood, the house that John shared with his wife and son, with those words and a nascent melody banging around in his head. Maybe he even sang those two lines to Julian when he arrived.

Hey Jude and Paul and John

But probably only the first two lines of Hey Jude (which are repeated later on the record) could plausibly be interpreted as being written about or for Julian. Here are the third and fourth lines:

Remember to let her into your heart
Then you can start to make it better.

Given that Julian was 5, it’s difficult to imagine that Paul would advise him to “let her into your heart.” It’s even difficult to speculate on who that unnamed her might be.*

Similarly, from later in the song:

Hey Jude, don’t let me down.
You have found her, now go and get her.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better.

Miles quotes John saying, in his August 1980 Playboy interview, that “I always heard it as a song to me,” which makes sense: John interpreted the song as Paul’s permission to leave him for his new partner. “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.” (Which, I know, why would John finding a new romantic partner mean that Paul would have to “lose” him as a songwriting partner?)

Miles then writes that “Paul had disagreed” with John’s assessment but doesn’t quote Paul on the true meaning of the song. Miles does write that Paul considered the song “more about himself,” imagining Paul “making the familiar drive to John’s house. . . thinking of all the changes in the lives,” including “his own ambivalence about Jane [Asher],” up from whom he had recently broken.

Paul doesn’t mention Jane in The Lyrics, and he doesn’t shed much light on Hey Jude’s true meaning:

The title early on was ‘Hey Jules’, but it quickly changed to ‘Hey Jude’ because I thought it was a bit less specific. I realised no one would know exactly what this was about, so I might just as well open it up a bit. . . . When I write, ‘You were made to go out and get her’, there’s now another character, a women, in the scene. . . . It could now be about this new woman’s relationship.

I’m sorry: Hey Jude is about a woman? Have you ever listened to Hey Jude and thought that the song was really about the woman who’s only referred to as her?

Hey Jude and . . . Francie ?

One name that’s missing from both of these versions of the Hey Jude origin story is Linda Eastman–later, of course, Linda McCartney. Paul met Linda in May 1967. If Paul were telling himself to let Linda into his heart and under his skin, wouldn’t he have told us that when discussing the song’s origin and meaning? That omission seems striking.

I can’t emphasize enough that what is pure speculation on my part: What if Paul were singing about himself but not about Jane or Linda? What if he were singing about Francie Schwartz, with whom Paul had a relationship in 1968? (That relationship may have led to Jane’s ending her engagement with Paul.)

I found a source that I can’t vouch for that seems to be a fragment from the transcript of John’s 1980 Playboy interview. This source reports that John said, “Although it’s also a song about him and Schwartz at the time, too.” (That line doesn’t appear in the printed version of the interview.) If the quotation is accurate, John seems to be implying that after Paul and Jane broke up, and before Paul committed to Linda, he wondered whether to commit to Francie.

What do you think about the true meaning of Hey Jude? Could Paul have written it an an expression of his feeling towards Francie Schwartz? Email me at beatltetrack@gmail.com.

*Maybe his classmate Lucy, whom Julian had illustrated in the sky with diamonds a year earlier?