Calling his seventh album Jude was an act of reclamation for Julian Lennon. In a recent interview, the 59-year-old explained that, while 1968 song “Hey, Jude” is “a great chanting song, a favourite Beatles song”, for him it had always been “a harsh reminder of what actually happened in my life, which was that my father [John Lennon] walked out on my mother [Cynthia] and me. That was a truly, truly difficult time.” Paul McCartney wrote the ballad to comfort his bandmate’s six-year-old son (originally calling it “Hey Jules”). John, rather typically, assumed that his bandmate had written it for him, as a blessing on his new relationship with Yoko Ono. No wonder Julian finally changed his birth name – John Charles Julian Lennon – to Julian Charles John in 2020.
Emotional echoes of this complicated public history reverberate through Jude’s solid collection of mature mid-tempo rockers and ballads. Lennon’s lyrics repeatedly circle themes of trust betrayed, the slog of survival and a wary yearning for new beginnings. “Save me/ Help me/ I feel I’ve lost control…” he sings, in his light, nasal graze of a voice on opener “Save Me”. It’s a track that builds from a mournful piano base into a confident crescendo of pounding 4/4 drums and strings swirling up and down Eastern semitones. Lennon says he wrote the song while looking in the mirror during the pandemic. So the lifelong loner (who struggled to make friends at school and still doesn’t consider himself part of the music scene) was pleading with his own reflection for assistance: “You’re the only one I know who lets the darkness come and go inside…”
