Hey Jude
"Hey Jude" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles that was released as a non-album single in August 1968. It was written by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. The single was the Beatles' first release on their Apple record label and one of the "First Four" singles by Apple's roster of artists, marking the label's public launch. "Hey Jude" was a number-one hit in many countries around the world and became the year's top-selling single in the UK, the US, Australia and Canada. Its nine-week run at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 tied the all-time record in 1968 for the longest run at the top of the US charts, a record it held for nine years. It has sold approximately eight million copies and is frequently included on music critics' lists of the greatest songs of all time.
For other uses, see Hey Jude (disambiguation)."Hey Jude"
The writing and recording of "Hey Jude" coincided with a period of upheaval in the Beatles. The ballad evolved from "Hey Jules", a song McCartney wrote to comfort John Lennon's young son Julian, after Lennon had left his wife for the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. The lyrics espouse a positive outlook on a sad situation, while also encouraging "Jude" to pursue his opportunities to find love. After the fourth verse, the song shifts to a coda featuring a "Na-na-na na" refrain that lasts for over four minutes.
"Hey Jude" was the first Beatles song to be recorded on eight-track recording equipment. The sessions took place at Trident Studios in central London, midway through the recording of the group's self-titled double album (also known as the "White Album"), and led to an argument between McCartney and George Harrison over the song's guitar part. Ringo Starr later left the band only to return shortly before they filmed the promotional clip for the single. The clip was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg and first aired on David Frost's UK television show. Contrasting with the problems afflicting the band, this performance captured the song's theme of optimism and togetherness by featuring the studio audience joining the Beatles as they sang the coda.
At over seven minutes in length, "Hey Jude" was the longest single to top the British charts up to that time.[1] Its arrangement and extended coda encouraged many imitative works through to the early 1970s. In 2013, Billboard magazine named it the 10th "biggest" song of all time in terms of chart success.[2] McCartney has continued to perform "Hey Jude" in concert since Lennon's murder in 1980, leading audiences in singing the coda. Julian Lennon and McCartney have each bid successfully at auction for items of memorabilia related to the song's creation.
Production[edit]
EMI rehearsals[edit]
Having earmarked the song for release as a single, the Beatles recorded "Hey Jude" during the sessions for their self-titled double album, commonly known as "the White Album".[32][33] The sessions were marked by an element of discord within the group for the first time, partly as a result of Ono's constant presence at Lennon's side.[34][35] The strained relations were also reflective of the four band members' divergence following their communal trip to Rishikesh in the spring of 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation.[36]
The Beatles first taped 25 takes of the song at EMI Studios in London over two nights, 29 and 30 July 1968,[32] with George Martin as their producer.[37] These dates served as rehearsals, however, since they planned to record the master track at Trident Studios to utilise their eight-track recording machine (EMI was still limited to four-tracks).[32] The first two takes from 29 July, which author and critic Kenneth Womack describes as a "jovial" session,[38] have been released on the 50th Anniversary box set of the White Album in 2018 and the Anthology 3 compilation in 1996, respectively.[39][40]
The 30 July rehearsals were filmed for a short documentary titled Music!,[41][42] which was produced by the National Music Council of Great Britain.[43] This was the first time that the Beatles had permitted a camera crew to film them developing a song in the studio.[21] The film shows only three of the Beatles performing "Hey Jude", as George Harrison remained in the studio control room,[44] with Martin and EMI recording engineer Ken Scott.[45][nb 4] During the rehearsals that day,[45] Harrison and McCartney had a heated disagreement over the lead guitar part for the song.[38] Harrison's idea was to play a guitar phrase as a response to each line of the vocal,[47] which did not fit with McCartney's conception of the song's arrangement, and he vetoed it.[48][49] Author Simon Leng views this as indicative of how Harrison was increasingly allowed little room to develop ideas on McCartney compositions, whereas he was free to create empathetic guitar parts for Lennon's songs of the period.[50] In a 1994 interview, McCartney said, "looking back on it, I think, Okay. Well, it was bossy, but it was ballsy of me, because I could have bowed to the pressure."[49] Ron Richards, a record producer who worked for Martin at both Parlophone and AIR Studios,[51] said McCartney was "oblivious to anyone else's feelings in the studio", and that he was driven to making the best possible record, at almost any cost.[52][nb 5]
Trident Studios recording[edit]
The Beatles recorded the master track for "Hey Jude" at Trident, where McCartney and Harrison had each produced sessions for their Apple artists,[56] on 31 July.[41] Trident's founder, Norman Sheffield, recalled that Mal Evans, the Beatles' aide and former roadie, insisted that some marijuana plants he had brought be placed in the studio to make the place "soft", consistent with the band's wishes.[57] Barry Sheffield served as recording engineer for the session. The line-up on the basic track was McCartney on piano and lead vocal, Lennon on acoustic guitar, Harrison on electric guitar, and Ringo Starr on drums.[48][58] The Beatles recorded four takes of "Hey Jude", the first of which was selected as the master.[48][58] With drums intended to be absent for the first two verses, McCartney began this take unaware that Starr had just left for a toilet break.[56] Starr soon returned – "tiptoeing past my back rather quickly", in McCartney's recollection – and performed his cue perfectly.[49]
Composition and structure[edit]
"Hey Jude" begins with McCartney singing lead vocals and playing the piano. The patterns he plays are based on three chords: F, C and B♭ (I, V and IV).[1] The main chord progression is "flipped on its head", in Hertsgaard's words, for the coda, since the C chord is replaced by E♭.[86] Everett comments that McCartney's melody over the verses borrows in part from John Ireland's 1907 liturgical piece Te Deum, as well as (with the first change to a B♭ chord) suggesting the influence of the Drifters' 1960 hit "Save the Last Dance for Me".[20][nb 10]
The second verse of the song adds accompaniment from acoustic guitar and tambourine. Tim Riley writes that, with the "restrained tom-tom and cymbal fill" that introduces the drum part, "the piano shifts downward to add a flat seventh to the tonic chord, making the downbeat of the bridge the point of arrival ('And any time you feel the pain')."[88] At the end of each bridge, McCartney sings a brief phrase ("Na-na-na na …"), supported by an electric guitar fill,[44] before playing a piano fill that leads to the next verse. According to Riley, this vocal phrase serves to "reorient the harmony for the verse as the piano figure turns upside down into a vocal aside". Additional musical details, such as tambourine on the third verse and subtle harmonies accompanying the lead vocal, are added to sustain interest throughout the four-verse, two-bridge song.[89]
The verse-bridge structure persists for approximately three minutes, after which the band leads into a four-minute-long coda, consisting of nineteen rounds of the song's double plagal cadence.[20] During this coda, the rest of the band, backed by an orchestra that also provides backing vocals, repeats the phrase "Na-na-na na" followed by the words "hey Jude" until the song gradually fades out.[nb 11] In his analysis of the composition, musicologist Alan Pollack comments on the unusual structure of "Hey Jude", in that it uses a "binary form that combines a fully developed, hymn-like song together with an extended, mantra-like jam on a simple chord progression".[91]
Riley considers that the coda's repeated chord sequence (I–♭VII–IV–I) "answers all the musical questions raised at the beginnings and ends of bridges", since "The flat seventh that posed dominant turns into bridges now has an entire chord built on it." This three-chord refrain allows McCartney "a bedding ... to leap about on vocally",[92] so he ad-libs his vocal performance for the rest of the song. In Riley's estimation, the song "becomes a tour of Paul's vocal range: from the graceful inviting tones of the opening verse, through the mounting excitement of the song itself, to the surging raves of the coda".[31]
Promotion[edit]
Apple shop window graffiti[edit]
A failed early promotional attempt for the single took place after the Beatles' all-night recording session on 7–8 August 1968.[116] With Apple Boutique having closed a week before, McCartney and Francie Schwartz painted Hey Jude/Revolution across its large, whitewashed shop windows.[117][118] The words were mistaken for antisemitic graffiti (since Jude means "Jew" in German),[117] leading to complaints from the local Jewish community,[96][119] and the windows being smashed by a passer-by.[120]
Discussing the episode in The Beatles Anthology, McCartney explained that he had been motivated by the location – "Great opportunity. Baker Street, millions of buses going around …" – and added: "I had no idea it meant 'Jew', but if you look at footage of Nazi Germany, 'Juden Raus' was written in whitewashed windows with a Star of David. I swear it never occurred to me."[22] According to Barry Miles, McCartney caused further controversy in his comments to Alan Smith of the NME that month, when, in an interview designed to promote the single,[121] he said: "Starvation in India doesn't worry me one bit, not one iota … And it doesn't worry you, if you're honest. You just pose."[96][nb 13]
Critical reception[edit]
In his contemporary review of the single, Derek Johnson of the NME wrote: "The intriguing features of 'Hey Jude' are its extreme length and the 40-piece orchestral accompaniment – and personally I would have preferred it without either!" While he viewed the track overall as "a beautiful, compelling song", and the first three minutes as "absolutely sensational", Johnson rued the long coda's "vocal improvisations on the basically repetitive four-bar chorus".[139] Johnson nevertheless concluded that "Hey Jude" and "Revolution" "prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Beatles are still streets ahead of their rivals".[140] Chris Welch of Melody Maker said he had initially been unimpressed, but came to greatly admire "Hey Jude" for its "slow, heavy, piano-ridden beat, sensuous, soulful vocals and nice thumpy drums". He added that the track would have benefited from being edited in length, as the climactic ending was "a couple of minutes too long".[141]
Cash Box's reviewer said that the extended fadeout, having been a device pioneered by the Beatles on "All You Need Is Love", "becomes something of an art form" in "Hey Jude", comprising a "trance-like ceremonial that becomes almost timeless in its continuity".[142] Time magazine described it as "a fadeout that engagingly spoofs the fadeout as a gimmick for ending pop records". The reviewer contrasted "Hey Jude" with "Revolution", saying that McCartney's song "urges activism of a different sort" by "liltingly exhort[ing] a friend to overcome his fears and commit himself in love".[143] Catherine Manfredi of Rolling Stone also read the lyrics as a message from McCartney to Lennon to end his negative relationships with women: "to break the old pattern; to really go through with love". Manfredi commented on the duality of the song's eponymous protagonist as a representation of good, in Saint Jude, "the Patron of that which is called Impossible", and of evil, in Judas Iscariot.[144] Other commentators interpreted "Hey Jude" as being directed at Bob Dylan, then semi-retired in Woodstock.[145][146]
Writing in 1971, Robert Christgau of The Village Voice called it "one of [McCartney's] truest and most forthright love songs" and said that McCartney's romantic side was ill-served by the inclusion of "'I Will', a piece of fluff" on The Beatles.[147] In their 1975 book The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, critics Roy Carr and Tony Tyler wrote that "Hey Jude" "promised great things" for the ill-conceived Apple enterprise and described the song as "the last great Beatles single recorded specifically for the 45s market". They commented also that "the epic proportions of the piece" encouraged many imitators, yet these other artists "[failed] to capture the gentleness and sympathy of the Beatles' communal feel".[146] Walter Everett admires the melody as a "marvel of construction, contrasting wide leaps with stepwise motions, sustained tones with rapid movement, syllabic with melismatic word-setting, and tension ... with resolution".[20] He cites Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks", Donovan's "Atlantis", the Moody Blues' "Never Comes the Day" and the Allman Brothers' "Revival" among the many songs with "mantralike repeated sections" that followed the release of "Hey Jude".[73][nb 14] In his entry for the song in his 1993 book Rock and Roll: The 100 Best Singles, Paul Williams describes it as a "song about breathing". He adds: "'Hey Jude' kicks ass like Van Gogh or Beethoven in their prime. It is, let's say, one of the wonders of this corner of creation ... It opens out like the sky at night or the idea of the existence of God."[149]
Alan Pollack highlights the song as "such a good illustration of two compositional lessons – how to fill a large canvas with simple means, and how to use diverse elements such as harmony, bassline, and orchestration to articulate form and contrast."[91] Pollack says that the long coda provides "an astonishingly transcendental effect",[91] while AllMusic's Richie Unterberger similarly opines: "What could have very easily been boring is instead hypnotic because McCartney varies the vocal with some of the greatest nonsense scatting ever heard in rock, ranging from mantra-like chants to soulful lines to James Brown power screams."[24] In his book Revolution in the Head, Ian MacDonald wrote that the "pseudo-soul shrieking in the fade-out may be a blemish" but he praised the song as "a pop/rock hybrid drawing on the best of both idioms".[150] MacDonald concluded: "'Hey Jude' strikes a universal note, touching on an archetypal moment in male sexual psychology with a gentle wisdom one might properly call inspired."[145] Lennon said the song was "one of [McCartney's] masterpieces".[15]
Commercial performance[edit]
The single was a highly successful debut for Apple Records,[151][152] a result that contrasted with the public embarrassment the band faced after the recent closure of their short-lived retail venture, Apple Boutique.[68] In the description of music journalist Paul Du Noyer, the song's "monumental quality ... amazed the public in 1968"; in addition, the release silenced detractors in the British mainstream press who had relished the opportunity to criticise the band for their December 1967 television special, Magical Mystery Tour, and their trip to Rishikesh in early 1968.[153] In the US, the single similarly brought an end to speculation that the Beatles' popularity might be diminishing, after "Lady Madonna" had peaked at number 4.[154]
"Hey Jude" reached the top of Britain's Record Retailer chart (subsequently adopted as the UK Singles Chart) in September 1968. It lasted two weeks on top before being replaced by Hopkin's "Those Were the Days",[133] which McCartney helped promote.[155] "Hey Jude" was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on 13 September; that same week, NME reported that two million copies of the single had been sold.[156] The song entered the Billboard Hot 100 in the US on 14 September, beginning a nineteen-week chart run there.[157] It reached number one on 28 September and held that position for nine weeks,[133] for three of which "Those Were the Days" held the number-two spot.[157] This was the longest run at number one for a single in the US until 1977.[73][115] The song was the 16th number-one hit there for the Beatles.[158] Billboard ranked it as the number-one song for 1968.[158] In Australia, "Hey Jude" was number one for 13 weeks, which remained a record there until ABBA's "Fernando" in 1976.[149] It also topped the charts in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Ireland, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and West Germany.[149]
On 30 November 1968, NME reported that sales had reached nearly six million copies worldwide.[159][160] By 1999, "Hey Jude" had sold an estimated eight million copies worldwide.[73] That year, it was certified 4× platinum by the RIAA, representing four million units shipped in the US.[161] As of December 2018, "Hey Jude" was the 54th-best-selling single of all time in the UK – one of six Beatles songs included on the top sales rankings published by the Official Charts Company.[162] It has since been described as an international global hit.[163][164]
Awards and accolades[edit]
"Hey Jude" was nominated for the Grammy Awards of 1969 in the categories of Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, but failed to win any of them.[165] In the 1968 NME Readers' Poll, "Hey Jude" was named the best single of the year,[166] and the song also won the 1968 Ivor Novello Award for "A-Side With the Highest Sales".[167] "Hey Jude" was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Grammy Hall of Fame in 2001[82] and it is one of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's "500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll".[149]
In 2001, the 1968 release of "Hey Jude" on Apple Records was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.[168]
In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked "Hey Jude" at number eight on the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time",[82] making it the highest-placed Beatles song on the list;[169] it dropped to number 89 in the 2021 revised list.[170] Among its many appearances in other best-song-of-all-time lists, VH1 placed it ninth in 2000[149] and Mojo ranked it at number 29 in the same year,[82] having placed the song seventh in a 1997 list of "The 100 Greatest Singles of All Time". In 1976, the NME ranked it 38th on the magazine's "Top 100 Singles of All Time", and the track appeared at number 77 on the same publication's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" in 2014. In January 2001, "Hey Jude" came in third on Channel 4's list of the "100 Greatest Singles".[171] The Amusement & Music Operators Association ranks "Hey Jude" as the 11th-best jukebox single of all time.[172] In 2008, the song appeared in eighth place on Billboard's "All Time Hot 100 Songs".[82]
In July 2006, Mojo placed "Hey Jude" at number 12 on its list of "The 101 Greatest Beatles Songs".[173] On a similar list compiled four years later, Rolling Stone ranked the song at number seven.[82][75] In 2015, the ITV program The Nation's Favourite Beatles Number One ranked "Hey Jude" in first place.[174] In 2018, the music staff of Time Out London ranked it at number 49 on their list of the best Beatles songs. Writing in the magazine, Nick Levine said: "Don't allow yourself to overlook this song because of its sheer ubiquity ... 'Hey Jude' is a huge-hearted, super-emotional epic that climaxes with one of pop's most legendary hooks."[175]
Cover versions and McCartney live performances[edit]
In 1968, R&B singer Wilson Pickett released a cover recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, with a guitar part played by a young Duane Allman, who recommended the song to Pickett.[189] Eric Clapton commented, "I remember hearing [it] and calling either Ahmet Ertegun or Tom Dowd and saying, 'Who's that guitar player?' ... To this day, I've never heard better rock guitar playing on an R&B record. It's the best."[190] Session musician Jimmy Johnson, who played on the recording, said that Allman's solo "created Southern rock".[191] Pickett's version reached number 23 on the Hot 100 and 13 on the Billboard R&B chart.[192]
"Hey Jude" was one of the few Beatles songs that Elvis Presley covered, when he rehearsed the track at his 1969 Memphis sessions with producer Chips Moman, a recording that appeared on the 1972 album Elvis Now.[193] A medley of "Yesterday" and "Hey Jude" was included on the 1999 reissue of Presley's 1970 live album On Stage.[194] Katy Perry performed "Hey Jude" as part of the 2012 MusiCares Person of the Year concert honouring McCartney.[195]
"All Around the World", a song by British rock band Oasis, features a several minute long outro much in the vein of "Hey Jude".
McCartney played "Hey Jude" throughout his 1989–90 world tour, his first tour since Lennon's murder in 1980.[196] McCartney had considered including it as the closing song on his band Wings' 1975 tours, but decided that "it just didn't feel right."[197] He has continued to feature the song in his concerts,[115] leading the audience in organised singalongs whereby different segments of the crowd – such as those in a certain section of the venue, then only men followed by only the women – chant the "Na-na-na na" refrain.[198]
McCartney played "Hey Jude" on Saturday Night Live on 2 February 1993, and as the final act during the Super Bowl XXXIX halftime show on 6 February 2005.
McCartney performed "Hey Jude" in the White House East Room as part of a concert honoring him with the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in June 2010.[199]
McCartney also sang the song in the closing moments of the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics hosted in London. On 4 August 2012, McCartney led the crowd in a rendition of "Hey Jude" while watching cycling at the velodrome.[200]
According to Ian MacDonald[201] and Mark Lewisohn:[48]
The Beatles
Additional musicians