PHOTOS: ROBERT ASHCROFT | “Get a little courage, find a little backbone,” urges Julian Lennon in “Every Little Moment,” the second track off his reflective new album Jude, in stores September 9th—and 10th on vinyl, in remembrance of his mother Cynthia Lennon’s birthday. Current and intensely relevant in its focuses of introspection and soul-searching—individually, and on behalf of the planet partly in turmoil—Jude was composed and produced over a span of years and shines as a beacon of authentic wisdom and earned insight, yet rooted in positivity.
The choice of album title, Jude, an allusion to Paul McCartney’s Beatles song written to Julian during a difficult time following his parents’ split—and his choice of album cover photo featuring his young self—suggests a kind of full circle of the individual. As in to know, understand, and feel close to one’s childhood self is to accept one’s truest, most uncompromised self.
In the past Lennon has alluded to having a love/hate relationship with the song “Hey Jude.” Releasing this album can be viewed as a revisiting of his childhood, and perhaps coming to terms with and accepting the past. Given that Get Back was released last year, which in part celebrated The Beatles’ legacy and brought the Let it Be era of the band’s career into a more finite documentation, that film’s journey in a way aligns with Lennon’s own journey as an artist, of revisiting feelings or episodes from one’s past and editing them differently and more comprehensively to reveal a more positive overall conclusion, and perhaps partly tying up loose ends in a spirit of enlightened acceptance.
Though Jude’s songs were composed and developed over a span of years, much of Lennon’s new album seems to encapsulate the shared mindset of humanity dealing with and trying to recuperate from the Covid era. “Save Me” speaks to someone seemingly unable to handle or cope with the darker sides of being alive. “You’re the only one I know / who lets the darkness come and go inside,” speaks to God maybe, the Universe, or just a friend who tolerates and who lives alongside the darker parts of the self and the world.
Dramatic, sweeping strings, commune with computerized effects to emotively articulate the reality of modern existence. “Breathe” highlights our common victimhood as we who keep the specters of despair at bay. Its lyrics detail the world’s collective feelings, that of generalized trauma accumulated by facing the state of the globe during these past number of bizarre and alienating years. “Breathe” as well should resonate with most listeners with its background sounds of children, an echo of lost innocence for the world.
On an album full of revelations, “Love Never Dies” is a standout, with a beautiful articulation of where our energy might go and what it might become once we die. There is evidence of earned wisdom, knowledge of what is important and real, and certainly what lasts. Lennon is in possession of a lush musical heritage given his parentage, but his individuality and unique artistic viewpoint transcend this fact, while still honoring it.
Congratulations on your new album, Jude. It’s a remarkable piece of work.
Thank you. So, your name is Jude?
Yes.
This is so weird. Hey, Jude.
My parents named me after the song.
Are you serious? Do you get sent all of the strange videos that I get sent? Of, say, three-year-old children playing “Hey Jude” on very strange stringed instruments?
Yes. All the time.
Yeah, me too. Okay. Well, onwards and upwards.
What was the developmental process like for this record, how did you come up with its sonic landscape? Was there a lot of planning ahead of time, or did it come together more organically?
After the last album, I didn’t think I was going to do any more. I’d kind of had enough, and I had enough work that had been shelved by the label. And then, I was independent for twenty years and did a couple of albums, but without label support it’s very difficult to be seen and heard. No matter how much promo you do, without that real support, it’s a tough one to get out there.
So I was kind of done, and I’d been following up on other projects, other mediums that I loved outside of music. That’s why I got into photography. One of my best friends, Timothy White, kind of steered me that way. He saw something in me. I had no idea I was a photographer. I mean, I had visual concepts and worked as a director on videos and other things, but never thought to take it that far. I’ve been involved with documentaries for a long time as Executive Producer and Producer, and so I got back into that as well.
The last one I was involved in was Kiss the Ground on Netflix, which was phenomenal. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen in fact, because it also started a platform that people can actually make change through and do some good, and it continues to this day. Then there were the children’s books. And the White Feather Foundation, which has been around for a long time, but now it’s becoming a much bigger organized foundation than ever before, slowly but surely. I was doing a lot of other things that I really enjoyed, and I wasn’t thinking about music.
How did music then recapture your attention?
My business manager in the UK was retiring, and he said, “Listen, I’ve got a bunch of boxes to send you.” They arrived, and most of them were files from the last ten years. But inside a couple of boxes were these old reel-to-reel demo tapes from the first album, Valotte. I had no idea they existed! There were boxes and boxes of other formats of music, as recording had progressed to digital, there were a gazillion formats in between. Of course I used all of them, which is a nightmare.
The idea was to try to see if any of this could be saved, because they’d been in boxes in a basement for thirty years. To my surprise, 99.9% of all the tapes were saved. My dear friend Justin Clayton and I had been hanging out and playing around with some ideas. He’s my oldest friend in the world; we went to school together, we’ve known each other since we were eleven. He co-wrote some of the songs on the first and second albums, and we toured the world together. Justin has a very good memory, which I don’t have. So he remembers what string he played, and what guitar he used and what amplifier, and that I was wearing a blue jumper that day, and I’m going, “what? I don’t know what happened yesterday.”
We decided to go through the tapes. This was about five years ago, maybe a little longer. We were finding songs that I remember recording in my old home studio in LA, this little bungalow up in the hills. I’d had a cassette of these songs, but I didn’t think I’d ever retrieve the real recordings. “Every Little Moment” was the first song that we found, and it was in great shape. The only thing that I wanted to do was literally to add real drums, because drum machines were all the rage in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But I wanted a real feel on it. Added a couple of other keyboards, and I re-sang the choruses to give it a bit more oomph. But that was it, an upgrade to the production. That was it, and the song was done. So that was a kind of guiding light.
Then we found “Not One Night,” which I’d sung the lead vocal on in my guest bedroom on a tape machine. And it’s the original vocal, it’s the same vocal. So we didn’t change any of that—we’d put on some other acoustic guitars in the studio, but the only thing we really changed was those new strings, the quartet. Apart from that, it’s the original vocal. And then we found other songs that were from ten years ago, twenty years ago. And I was writing in between all of this, just because, why not. And again, I had no idea that I was putting an album together. I thought, in this climate of musical platforms, I’ll just throw a single out here or there if anybody’s interested, or maybe an EP with a couple of songs on it. Then I can go back to photography and documentary-making and other stuff.
How did the EP lead to this eleven-track LP, Jude?
The head of BMG, Hartwig Masuch is his name, is based in Germany. He ran into two different friends of mine in two different countries over the course of six months. And from each of these friends came back this message saying, “Hartwig from BMG, says that if you ever want to do music again, to give him a call.” I’d been working with Leica cameras, and they had invited me to an event in Berlin where they’re based, which is also where BMG is based. So I was going to leave the next day to go to Berlin, and I decided, maybe I should try to find Hartwig.
So we met, and I liked him a lot. He’s very genuine. He played guitar, he loved the history of music. You could see his real passion. He said I should think about doing a record. I said, I wasn’t doing a record, only singles or EPs. Anyway, six tracks in, he flipped for them and said, “this would be a great record.” And I said again that I wasn’t doing a record album, just singles and EPs. Anyway, by the time I got to eight or nine songs, I was like, “okay… it might be a record.” Then once I had eleven, and I put them in a particular sequence, even though they were done over a period of thirty years, they kind of worked.
And then what was really the icing on the cake was, the mix, mixing the songs with Spike Stent, who was the overall glue to all of the tracks to make them feel like they weren’t done over several decades. You just wouldn’t know that. I’d say he did a Nigel on it, which is that he turned all the songs up to number eleven, in the mix process. It just made the energy come alive from all of the work that we’d been doing. The process of the actual album was over four years, because Covid hit while we were halfway through it as well. My friend Justin, who was co-producing, had to go back to England.
How did you adapt to the unforeseen circumstances and still finish the record?
We had to figure out, how the hell do we finish the album like this? I had to remember how to engineer again. The first song that I engineered on my own when Justin went back, was “Freedom.” It felt good and kind of set a precedent for the vibe and feel of the album. It’s got an ebb and flow, kind of like the old school albums that were storytelling and not just bashing out hit songs. When I listen to music, I want more than that. I want expression and emotion, and to walk away from listening to something feeling that it touched me in some way.
So that was the objective anyway, to take what I’d done before and take it to the next level. I didn’t know it was possible, and I didn’t think I was going to do it. Then I had to go to LA, to meet with the American contingent of BMG. On the plane was the first time that I decided to listen to the album the whole way through. I sat by the window, the sun was either coming up or going down, and I just was tearful. I went, “Wow, now that’s an album.” But it got to me, you know, it really got to me. So it’s the weirdest album I’ve ever done, because of the way it was put together. It’s not normal in any way, shape, or form. I still feel that I can’t quite describe it, but for whatever reason it works. And people that have heard it so far, have said nothing but great things about it. So who am I to scream and shout saying anything otherwise?
There seems to be a tone of maturity and grace and wisdom that can only come with time throughout this album. “Not One Night” has a realism to its lyrics, and still a triumph over the fear of loneliness perhaps. Do you feel that the journey you took to get to this moment in your artistic life has allowed you to write this album’s songs?
I hate to generalize, but I think a lot of the album is about getting over fear. It’s about facing yourself. The whole Covid lockdown really took its toll, in the sense that I really had to look at myself and ask some questions. What is this life? What does it mean to me? What the fuck am I doing? What makes me happy, and what doesn’t make me happy? So for the past few years it’s been that kind of journey. Not that I haven’t done that throughout my life, but it’s certainly been focused times ten.
Considering being on your own. And so how do you keep it up? How do you get over the lonely bits? And it was about—I hate this terminology—but it was about falling in love with yourself. It was about feeling good in your own skin, being comfortable in your own skin. So a lot of the songs have been that journey. Obviously much of the stuff is written considering other people in mind, but at the heart of it, it’s just looking in the mirror and saying, “okay, what’s up? Where are we at? How are we doing?” That’s what it all stems from, and finding that level of happiness and peace and balance, whether you’re on your own or not. I think that’s partly been key to figuring out what’s going on.
“Every Little Moment” seems to encourage the listener to move on and to realize the proverbial war is over, and to find one’s courage in spite of potential hindrances. Do you feel that adverse global times, such as the ones we are currently living through during the Covid era and amidst the war in Ukraine, and the ongoing catastrophe of global warming, inspire the choice for hope, in spite of the surrounding adversity?
The song was written thirty years ago and could be relatable to a hundred conflicts around the world. It’s just that now with social media and news worldwide, we know about it more. So it’s more about the hope that we should all have, that one day all of this crap will be over. I keep scratching my head literally every day, given that we’ve been around for thousands of years but we still can’t get our shit together. We’re supposed to be the intelligent ones. I know we’ve heard it a million times before, but it’s true and it drives me absolutely nuts. It’s very frustrating that those in the higher echelons of power etc., continue to play this game with all of us, which doesn’t balance life out the way it should be and creates hardship. This is why we have pain and suffering and refugees around the world. It’s horrendous, and it’s just shocking that we’re not in a better place now—you would have thought that we would be.
The album’s last track “Gaia” seems to serve as a beautiful closing prayer that articulates the complexity of the human condition, and also doesn’t shy away from emotionality, which can be difficult to do when articulating a more cerebral, philosophical reflection. The structure of the song with spoken word in the French language, and lush strings, create such a moody atmosphere. How did this track come about?
It’s strange. I had the fortune of meeting this band Snarky Puppy. The band can consist of anywhere from ten to twenty people at any given point in time, when solo artists and different band members come under the umbrella of Snarky Puppy to write, record, and play live. They’re all multi-instrumentalists on the highest level, and I’d argue they’re one of the best jazz bands in the world.
I befriended a couple of the folk there, a pianist called Bill Laurance. I’m not a practicing musician at all. I write and record, but then I’m taking pictures, I’m doing something else until something hits me, and then I’ll go back to the piano or the guitar. I heard Bill playing, and I said if I were a practicing musician, that’s how I would play. We became friends, and we did some writing together. He’d just released an album called Cables which I loved. The only way I can describe it is the Blade Runner soundtrack meets Keith Jarrett. That’s my take.
There was something in “Cables,” the title track, that I just kept dreaming about, that I kept hearing. It sounded so French to me. The song has all kinds of electronics going on that come in and out, but there was an underlying melody that I fell in love with. So I asked Bill to record the song just on the piano, and then I was going to screw it up, edit it, and do all kinds of stuff. I didn’t quite know what it was going to be, but all I knew was that in this bridge section, I heard Paul Buchanan, from The Blue Nile, singing it. I wanted him to write some pieces for it, and he wasn’t available to do that, but he was able to do the vocals.
I always imagined hearing the French voice on the track; I kept hearing crackly 1930s, ’40s, ’50s, old black-and-white TV and radio sounds. I was scrolling through social media, and I heard someone who sounded like the voice I had been hearing in my head. Lo and behold, she lived twenty minutes away from me and knew friends of mine. The song “Gaia” is an interchange between Mother Earth—Gaia and humanity, disguised as a love story-ish. Kind of strange. But she fell in love with it and got the gist of it.
The next morning I woke up and there was an email there with her just on an iPhone playing the piano track back on the piano, with these incredibly beautiful sounding lyrics about the sun and the moon, on the horizon. I had goosebumps, and immediately I snipped out the front of the real song and put that taped version of her on the iPhone, at the beginning. That’s what you hear. When I approached Paul Buchanan, I asked, “Paul, can you do these vocals?” And he said, “Jules, there’s no studio here, I’m in Glasgow. There’s nothing, it’s miserable. It’s grey, there’re no studios.” And I’m going, “great—have you got a pair of headphones?” “Yes.” “Sing it on your iPhone.”
That song was like connecting a dream, a conversation in a dream that just fizzles out. Either you’re going to sleep or waking up, I can’t quite figure it out. It’s a weird arrangement, but why does it have to be one thing or another?
It’s the perfect closer.
I think so too. Especially after “Stay,” which is a bit dramatic for some people. That might have been a bit of an edgy end. But I think “Gaia” just kind of settles down and says, “thank you and good night. ”
Do you view your work in the White Feather Foundation as being intertwined with your work as a musician? Having the same vision of promoting peace, and drawing attention to the environmental preservation that the planet needs?
“Saltwater” was written over 25 years ago, and that song’s nothing but environmental and humanitarian issues. There’ve been a couple of songs along the way. I just keep thinking to myself, how many bloody environmental songs will I have written before things have changed in the world? So—yes, because White Feather is part of everything I do. Whatever I make financially, a good portion of it goes back to White Feather. Whether that’s photography, documentary work, music, some of it goes back so I can keep helping people. So it’s tied regardless. But it’s always there, emotionally anyway. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.
Is it important for you to release your new album Jude on vinyl?
Oh it is. I wanted to release the album on my mother’s birthday, in remembrance. Her birthday is the 10th of September. So the album will be released on the 9th, but the vinyl is coming out on Mum’s birthday, on the 10th of September. That was very, very important for me.
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