As any songwriter or memoirist knows, sometimes the best way to tap into universal human experiences is by telling intimate, personal stories. These narratives, more often than not, tend to be extremely relatable to many.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Beatles<\/a> certainly did this, often conveying universal themes through strikingly specific lyrics that drew on their own experiences. From heartbreak and disillusionment to a desire to encourage a younger person to \u201ctake a sad song and make it better,\u201d the Beatles frequently dipped into the wells of their personal lives to create some of their most enduring songs.<\/p>\n Sometimes, though, they branched outward, drawing from headlines, scandals, rumors, and even pets to craft musical masterpieces. Here are seven iconic songs that the Beatles write about real people (and one beloved dog).<\/p>\n \u201cHey Jude\u201d<\/a>\u201cJulia\u201d<\/a>\u201cMartha My Dear\u201d<\/a>\u201cDear Prudence\u201d<\/a>\u201cShe\u2019s Leaving Home\u201d<\/a>\u201cSexy Sadie\u201d<\/a>\u201cEleanor Rigby\u201d<\/a>\u201cHey Jude\u201d<\/p>\n John Lennon<\/a> may have been the one who divorced his wife Cynthia after meeting Yoko Ono, becoming distanced from his son Julian in the process. But it was Paul McCartney<\/a> who wrote the biggest song to come out of the dissolution of Lennon\u2019s first family.<\/p>\n McCartney wrote this song on the way to pay a visit to Cynthia and Julian after the split in 1968. \u201cWe\u2019d been very good friends for millions of years and I thought it was a bit much for them [Cynthia and Julian] to suddenly to be persona non gratae out of my life,\u201d McCartney said<\/a>. \u201cSo I decided to pay them a visit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He had often written songs while journeying out to where Cynthia lived in Kenwood, and so started to do just that while on this particular trip. What emerged was a tune meant to provide some encouragement and comfort to four-year-old Julian after his parents\u2019 divorce. Originally, the lyrics were \u201cHey, Jules,\u201d but McCartney chose Jude because he thought the word sounded better.<\/p>\n Lennon later claimed he felt the song was about him, not his son. \u201cI always heard it as a song to me,\u201d he said in an interview<\/a>. \u201cIf you think about it\u2026Yoko\u2019s just come into the picture. He\u2019s saying \u2018Hey Jude\u2013hey, John\u2019…subconsciously he was saying, go ahead, leave me. On a conscious level, he didn\u2019t want me to go ahead. The angel in him was saying \u2018bless you.\u2019 The devil in him didn\u2019t like it at all, because he was losing his partner.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJulia\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJulia\u201d is a wistful, meditative love song that John Lennon wrote while in India, on the trip when the Beatles went to study transcendental meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. According to Lennon himself, the tune was an ode both to his mother, Julia, and his partner, Yoko Ono.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Julia\u2019 was my mother,\u201d Lennon said<\/a>. \u201cBut it was sort of a combination of Yoko and my mother blended into one. That was written in India. On the White Album. And all the stuff on the White Album was written in India while we were supposedly giving money to Maharishi, which we never did. We got our mantra, we sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food and writing all those songs. We wrote tons of songs in India.\u201d<\/p>\n Lennon had a traumatic childhood. His father and mother met as teenagers and shared a contentious relationship that culminated in his father going off the grid, and Lennon was raised mostly by his aunt and uncle.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, he and his mother became closer when Lennon was a teen, and she encouraged him to pursue music. Tragically, though, Julia died when she was 44 after being hit by a car. Lennon was reportedly largely unable to process emotions around her death until he participated in primal scream therapy<\/a> in the early 1970s, but he did address her in the song \u201cJulia,\u201d which is a melancholic tribute to the two most important women in Lennon\u2019s life.\u00a0<\/p>\n The song\u2019s first lyric, \u201cHalf of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you,\u201d is a direct reference to the Khalil Gibran quote \u201cHalf of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so the other half may reach you\u201d from his book Sand and Foam<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cMartha My Dear\u201d<\/p>\n The question of whether a dog should be featured on a list of \u201csongs inspired by real people\u201d is open to debate, but it is true that Paul McCartney\u2019s \u201cMartha My Dear\u201d was written about none other than McCartney\u2019s dog, Martha.<\/p>\n There was nothing particularly deep that inspired McCartney to pen an ode to his sheepdog, though. \u201cI just started thinking about some words with a tune,\u201d McCartney said<\/a>. “I don’t ever write a song thinking, ‘Now, I’ll write a song about…’ I do, sometimes, but mainly, I don’t. I’m doing a tune and then some words come into my head and these happened to be ‘Martha my dear,’ you know, ‘spend my days in conversation.’ It doesn’t mean anything, you know, those words just happened to come into my head. You see, this is what this song is all about, this song is about my dog, but I don’t particularly want her to remember me…So you can read anything you like into it, but really it’s just a song. It’s me singing to my dog.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite McCartney\u2019s claims that nothing special motivated him to write \u201cMartha My Dear,\u201d we do know that he was quite fond of the animal. \u201cMartha was my first ever pet. I never had a dog or a cat at home. She was a dear pet of mine,\u201d he said<\/a>. \u201cI remember John being amazed to see me being so loving to an animal. He said, ‘I’ve never seen you like that before.’ I’ve since thought, you know, he wouldn’t have. It’s only when you’re cuddling around with a dog that you’re in that mode. And she was a very cuddly dog.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In his book The Lyrics, Paul explained how Martha\u2019s presence actually may have helped Lennon warm up to him. Martha was \u201ca lovely little dog. I just adored her,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOne of the unlikely side effects was that John became very sympathetic towards me. When he came ’round and saw me playing with Martha, I could tell that he liked her. John was a very guarded person, which was partly where all his wit came from. He’d had a very difficult upbringing…Seeing me with Martha, with my guard down, all of a sudden he started warming to me. And so he let his guard down too.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDear Prudence\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDear Prudence\u201d is actually based on the Beatles\u2019 efforts to try to persuade Prudence Farrow, the younger sister of actress Mia Farrow, to come out of her hut at the ashram where they were staying in Rishikesh, India. All of them were there to study meditation under the Maharishi, but Farrow began spending a great deal of time in isolation, which caused some people\u2014including the Beatles\u2014to fear for her mental health.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one was to know that sooner or later she was to go completely berserk under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,\u201d Lennon can be heard saying<\/a> at the end of a demo of the song. \u201cAll the people around her were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So we sang to her.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Lennon elaborated on the story in an interview with Playboy<\/a>. \u201cMia Farrow\u2019s sister, who seemed to go slightly balmy, meditating too long, wouldn\u2019t come out of the little hut we were living in. They selected me and George to try and bring her out because she would trust us,\u201d he said. \u201cShe went completely mental. If she\u2019d been in the West they would have put her away. We got her out of the house. She\u2019d been locked in for three weeks and wouldn\u2019t come out, trying to reach God quicker than anybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n Paul McCartney recalled similar events. \u201cPrudence Farrow got an attack of the horrors, paranoia, an identity crisis and wouldn\u2019t come out of her Butlins chalet. We all got a little bit worried about her, so we went up there and knocked, \u2018Hi, Prudence. We all love you. You\u2019re wonderful!\u2019 But nobody could persuade her out,\u201d he said<\/a>.<\/p>\n Farrow herself, who had come to the Maharishi after a bad experience with LSD and who still practices<\/a> transcendental meditation to this day, recalled things slightly differently. Over the years, she has insisted that she wasn’t going insane\u2014she really was just extremely focused on meditation. <\/p>\n \u201cI would always rush straight back to my room after lectures and meals so I could meditate. John, George and Paul [McCartney] would all want to sit around jamming and having a good time and I\u2019d be flying into my room,\u201d she recalled<\/a>. \u201cThey were all serious about what they were doing, but they just weren\u2019t as fanatical as me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s Leaving Home\u201d<\/p>\n Plenty of kids ran away from home in the 1960s and 1970s, but only one became the subject of a Beatles song. That was Melanie Coe, who inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney to pen this tune after they saw an article about her in the news.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who\u2019d left home and not been found, there were a lot of those at the time, and that was enough to give us a storyline. So I started to get the lyrics: she slips out and leaves a note and then the parents wake up…It was rather poignant,\u201d McCartney recalled<\/a>.<\/p>\n Coe ran away from home at age 17. Pregnant and afraid of how her parents would react, she left with a man she\u2019d just met and lived with him for a week before she returned home, and later had an abortion. Her story made The Daily Mirror, which is how the most famous songwriting duo of all time caught wind of it.<\/p>\n Strangely, though, Coe and McCartney had actually previously crossed paths in real life years prior when McCartney judged a contest<\/a> that Coe had won. The crossover had occurred at the start of Beatlemania, when the Beatles performed on the show Ready Steady Go! Coe, who was 13 at the time, was a dancer on the show, and the Beatles were asked to judge a dance and lip-synching contest. McCartney volunteered to pick the winner, and chose a girl he would unknowingly write a song about years later.<\/p>\n \u201cSexy Sadie\u201d<\/p>\n Yet another song that came out of the Beatles\u2019 time in India was \u201cSexy Sadie.\u201d The song originated from John Lennon\u2019s disillusionment with the Maharishi, who he had been following as a spiritual guru. In 1970, Lennon explained that it was written after he heard rumors that the Maharishi had behaved inappropriately towards Mia Farrow. <\/p>\n \u201cI wouldn’t write ‘Maharishi, what have you done, you made a fool of everyone,’ but now it can be told, fab listeners…That was about the Maharishi,\u201d Lennon said<\/a>. \u201c…We went to see him. I was the spokesman, as usual whenever the dirty work came. I said, ‘We’re leaving.’ He asked, ‘Why?,’ and all that sh*t, and I said, ‘Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Different Beatles have shared different <\/a>stories about what actually happened at the ashram. George Harrison<\/a> denied the rumors entirely. \u201cSomeone started the nasty rumor about Maharishi, a rumor that swept the media for years…This whole piece of bullsh*t was invented,\u201d he wrote in the book Beatles Anthology. \u201cIt’s probably even in the history books that Maharishi ‘tried to attack Mia Farrow’\u2014but it’s bullsh*t, total bullsh*t. Just go ask Mia Farrow. There were a lot of flakes there; the whole place was full of flaky people. Some of them were us.\u201d\u00a0Paul McCartney, meanwhile, said that Lennon had seen the Maharishi making advances on a woman who looked like Mia Farrow, but hadn\u2019t seen any evidence of assault. <\/p>\n The band\u2019s exit from the ashram may have also been prompted by the fact that the Maharishi allegedly began asking them for quite a bit of money<\/a>.\u00a0Farrow herself has never publicly accused the Maharishi of assault, and there are many different accounts of what actually happened at the ashram.<\/p>\n Regardless, the band left the ashram on non-ideal terms. However, what happened, or did not happen, there was immortalized by \u201cSexy Sadie\u201d forever, and their journey to India undoubtedly helped bring Eastern spirituality into the mainstream in the West.<\/p>\n \u201cEleanor Rigby\u201d<\/p>\n