John Lennon’s Favorite Lyric in “Hey Jude”

Hey Jude, don’t make it bad.
Take a sad song and make it better.
Remember to let her into your heart,
Then you can start to make it better.

While McCartney was mocking up what would become “Hey Jude,” Lennon and Yoko Ono gave their two cents on the project–at the request of Macca.

“John and Yoko came to visit and they were right behind me over my right shoulder, standing up, listening to it as I played it to them, and when I got to the line, ‘The movement you need is on your shoulder,’” McCartney once said. “I looked over my shoulder and I said, ‘I’ll change that, it’s a bit crummy. I was just blocking it out,’ and John said, ‘You won’t, you know. That’s the best line in it!’

That’s collaboration,” he continued. “When someone’s that firm about a line that you’re going to junk, and he said, ‘No, keep it in.’ So of course you love that line twice as much because it’s a little stray, it’s a little mutt that you were about to put down and it was reprieved and so it’s more beautiful than ever. I love those words now…”

McCartney went on to talk about how time–and likely Lennon’s death–made him appreciate the odd, yet fitting line.

“Time lends a little credence to things,” McCartney added. “You can’t knock it, it just did so well. But when I’m singing it, that is when I think of John, when I hear myself singing that line; it’s an emotional point in the song.”

Prior to his death, Lennon talked about the subject matter in “Hey Jude.” While Lennon recognized that it was written as an ode to his son, he felt McCartney was also speaking to him with his lyrics.

“I always heard it as a song to me,” Lennon once said. “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. The words ‘go out and get her’ – subconsciously he was saying, Go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn’t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying, ‘Bless you.’ The devil in him didn’t like it at all because he didn’t want to lose his partner.”