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[orleans]

After Lennon and his wife Cynthia Powell separated due to Lennon's affair with Yoko Ono, McCartney drove out to see Powell and Julian, her son with Lennon. "We'd been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them suddenly to be persona non gratae and out of my life," McCartney said.<2> Later, Powell recalled, "I was truly surprised when, one afternoon, Paul arrived on his own. I was touched by his obvious concern for our welfare.... On the journey down he composed 'Hey Jude' in the car. I will never forget Paul's gesture of care and concern in coming to see us."<3>

The song's original title was "Hey Jules", and it was intended to comfort Julian Lennon from the stress of his parents' divorce. McCartney said, "I started with the idea 'Hey Jules', which was Julian, don't make it bad, take a sad song and make it better. Hey, try and deal with this terrible thing. I knew it was not going to be easy for him. I always feel sorry for kids in divorces ... I had the idea by the time I got there. I changed it to 'Jude' because I thought that sounded a bit better."<2> Julian Lennon 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."<4>

Although McCartney originally wrote the song for Julian Lennon, John Lennon thought it had actually been written for him:<5>

“ But I always heard it as a song to me. If you think about it... Yoko's 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. ”

Other people believed McCartney wrote the song about them, including Judith Simons, a journalist with the Daily Express.<6> Still others, including Lennon, have speculated that McCartney's failing long-term relationship with Jane Asher when he wrote "Hey Jude" was an unconscious "message to himself".<7> In fact, when Lennon mentioned that he thought the song was about him, McCartney denied it, and told Lennon he had written the song about himself.<8>

McCartney changed the title to "Hey Jude" because the name Jude was easier to sing.<4> Much as he did with "Yesterday", McCartney played the song for other musicians and friends. Ron Griffith of Badfinger, the first band to join the Beatles-owned record label Apple Records, recalled that on their first day in the studio, "Paul walked over to the grand piano and said, 'Hey lads, have a listen', and he sat down and gave us a full concert rendition of 'Hey Jude'. We were gobsmacked.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hey_Jude