As the son of a Beatle, Julian Lennon was perhaps destined to go into music, launching his impressive recording career in 1984 with Valotte. That hit album yielded two top 10 singles and went platinum in the U.S., but Julian’s musical journey hasn’t always been easy, so he has often taken off a decade or more between albums to focus on his other passions, including photography, documentary filmmaking, authoring children’s books, and his environmental organization, the White Feather Foundation.
However, with Jude — his first album since 2011 — the 59-year-old singer-songwriter’s career is coming full-circle, as indicated by the comeback LP’s loaded title. “For me, Jude was all about the coming-of-age in many respects, because it was hearkening back to some of the comments and lyrics in ‘Hey Jude,’” he tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It just felt like the right title and the right thing, and owning it. That was a different thing — being ‘Julian,’ being ‘Jules,’ being ‘Jude.’ Who I am. It’s about also breaking through any fear and anxiety I used to have about the Beatles, about Dad, about everything.”
The album’s title is obviously a reference to the Beatles’ epic 1968 ballad “Hey Jude,” which Paul McCartney wrote to comfort Julian when John Lennon was separating from Julian’s mother, Cynthia. Julian was only 5 years old at the time and didn’t grasp the message of the song — which was originally titled “Hey Jules” — until “much later in life, when I was listening to what [McCartney] had written and what he was hoping for me, which is to take the weight off my shoulders of the world and to find love and to be happy in life.” And that's why the title Jude is “so relevant” now.
“Recently, in 2020, I decided that I was going to change my name, because originally my name was John Lennon — John Charles Julian Lennon,” Julian explains. “And I'd had issues with that, especially at airports and security — not-so-great moments and comments that had gone by because of my name being John, whether people recognized me or not. I decided that in 2020, after going through another learning process in life, that I wanted to become Julian. I was sick and tired of being someone else's John. And so, I changed my name to Julian Charles John Lennon. … And that was all related to ‘Jude’ and ‘Jules,’ which is my nickname on a daily basis. So, it just made sense to me, and also with what was going on with the Beatles and Get Back and my feelings about that too. It was all intermingled.”
Julian admits that watching Get Back, Peter Jackson’s deep-dive docuseries comprising more than six hours of unseen, often unexpectedly joyful footage originally captured for Michael Lindsay-Hogg's documentary about the Beatles’ Let It Be album, was “a lot to process.” But, he stresses, “It really reminded me of the way Dad used to be. You know, when we were together, when I was a kid, he was funny, goofy, sarcastic, talented, moody, broody — but fun. And that was all the things that he was to me when we lived together. And it made me fall in love with him again, which was really lovely. It made me appreciate him again, and reminded me of how he was before everything went a bit pear-shaped.”
Julian says he’d already forgiven his once-estranged father — who was murdered in 1980, when Julian was age 17 and just beginning to re-establish a bond with John — “many years ago for the stress that happened in not only in my life, but Mom's life too. … Certainly we tried to embrace each other's company and tried to learn about each other again before he passed. And it was enjoyable experience. It was great. And I was longing to hang out with him even more, but you know, sadly what happened, happened. … So, [Get Back] was just a way of remembering who he was and seeing the human side of him again. And that inspired me, and I loved that. So, the idea of that also tied into being ‘Jude’ as well.”