Hey Jude: The Song You Never Knew Was About a Breakup
“Hey Jude” is one of the most beloved Beatles’ songs, but the beautiful melody hides the true sadness that inspired it: John Lennon and Paul McCartney were growing apart and The Beatles were on the verge of breaking up.
“Hey Jude” was McCartney’s way of expressing the end of his most important rite of passage: his friendship with Lennon. Lennon and McCartney became friends as teenagers in Liverpool over a mutual interest in music, but it was the loss of their mothers that really bonded them as brothers. Once Lennon recognized how talented McCartney was, they became inseparable. In a 1980 interview with Playboy Magazine John Lennon described their symbiotic relationship as both friends and musicians, saying:
“[Paul] provided a lightness, an optimism, while I would always go for the sadness, the discords, the bluesy notes. There was a period when I thought I didn't write melodies, that Paul wrote those and I just wrote straight, shouting rock 'n' roll. But, of course, when I think of some of my own songs—"In My Life", or some of the early stuff, "This Boy"—I was writing melodies with the best of them.”
Although Lennon and McCartney often wrote independently—and many Beatles songs are primarily the work of one or the other—it was rare that a song would be completed without some input from both writers. In many instances, one writer would sketch an idea or a song fragment and take it to the other to finish or improve; in some cases, two incomplete songs or song ideas that they each had worked on individually would be combined into a complete song. Often one of the pair would add a middle eight or bridge section to the other's verse and chorus.
Producer George Martin attributed the high quality of their songwriting to the friendly rivalry between them. This approach of the Lennon–McCartney songwriting team—with elements of competitiveness and mutual inspiration as well as straightforward collaboration and creative merging of musical ideas—is often cited as a key reason for The Beatles' innovation and popular success. However, as time went on, the songs increasingly became the work of one writer or the other, often with the partner offering up only a few words or an alternative chord.
McCartney knew the end was near not just because of their inability to compose together but because of the intensity he saw in Lennon’s new relationship with artist Yoko Ono. Lennon had separated from his wife Cynthia in May of 1968 due to the affair with Ono. Although McCartney was willing to support his friend and even let the couple stay at his house in St. John's Wood, when Lennon discovered a note written by McCartney containing disparaging and racist comments about Ono, the couple moved out.
It is within the lyrics of “Hey Jude” that you can hear McCartney’s goodbye to his relationship with John.
McCartney knew Lennon really well and had witnessed the toll on his emotional and psychological state, which prompted him to write, “take a sad song and make it better, remember to let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better”. Paul’s most direct message: “Hey Jude, don’t let me down, you have found her, now go and get her… you’re waiting for someone to perform with.”
The lyrics were not meant to comfort Julian Lennon after his parents’ divorce, as McCartney had initially described it. He was describing an adult that found real love and needed to move on to pursue it. The line about “someone to perform with” was the most raw and revealing lyric McCartney has ever written because until that point and time the only people Lennon had chosen to perform with were McCartney and bandmates George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
Three days before his death, Lennon summarized his feelings towards McCartney in an interview, "Throughout my career, I've selected to work with ... only two people: Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono ... That ain't bad picking."
In writing “Hey Jude”, McCartney was acknowledging that he saw the future of John and Yoko, but not of The Beatles.
Although they wouldn’t formally break up until over a year later in 1970, McCartney had already accepted that the end was near. As he revealed on The Late Show in September 2019, “The thing is when you’ve had a relationship like that for so long, it was such a deep relationship. I love it when people revisit you in your dreams. So, I often have band dreams and they’re crazy... I have a lot of dreams about John. And they’re always good.”