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. 

The Beatles 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 “take a sad song and make it better,” the Beatles frequently dipped into the wells of their personal lives to create some of their most enduring songs.

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).

1. “Hey Jude”
2. “Julia”
3. “Martha My Dear”
4. “Dear Prudence”
5. “She’s Leaving Home”
6. “Sexy Sadie”
7. “Eleanor Rigby”

“Hey Jude”

John Lennon 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 who wrote the biggest song to come out of the dissolution of Lennon’s first family.

McCartney wrote this song on the way to pay a visit to Cynthia and Julian after the split in 1968. “We’d 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,” McCartney said. “So I decided to pay them a visit.” 

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’ divorce. Originally, the lyrics were “Hey, Jules,” but McCartney chose Jude because he thought the word sounded better.

Lennon later claimed he felt the song was about him, not his son. “I always heard it as a song to me,” he said in an interview. “If you think about it…Yoko’s just come into the picture. He’s saying ‘Hey Jude–hey, John’…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 was losing his partner.”

“Julia”

“Julia” 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. 

“‘Julia’ was my mother,” Lennon said. “But 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.”

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. 

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 in the early 1970s, but he did address her in the song “Julia,” which is a melancholic tribute to the two most important women in Lennon’s life. 

The song’s first lyric, “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you,” is a direct reference to the Khalil Gibran quote “Half of what I say is meaningless; but I say it so the other half may reach you” from his book Sand and Foam.

“Martha My Dear”

The question of whether a dog should be featured on a list of “songs inspired by real people” is open to debate, but it is true that Paul McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” was written about none other than McCartney’s dog, Martha.

There was nothing particularly deep that inspired McCartney to pen an ode to his sheepdog, though. “I just started thinking about some words with a tune,” McCartney said. “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.”

Despite McCartney’s claims that nothing special motivated him to write “Martha My Dear,” we do know that he was quite fond of the animal. “Martha was my first ever pet. I never had a dog or a cat at home. She was a dear pet of mine,” he said. “I 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.” 

In his book The Lyrics, Paul explained how Martha’s presence actually may have helped Lennon warm up to him. Martha was “a lovely little dog. I just adored her,” he wrote. “One 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.”

“Dear Prudence”

“Dear Prudence” is actually based on the Beatles’ 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—including the Beatles—to fear for her mental health.

“No one was to know that sooner or later she was to go completely berserk under the care of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi,” Lennon can be heard saying at the end of a demo of the song. “All the people around her were very worried about the girl because she was going insane. So we sang to her.” 

Lennon elaborated on the story in an interview with Playboy. “Mia Farrow’s sister, who seemed to go slightly balmy, meditating too long, wouldn’t 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,” he said. “She went completely mental. If she’d been in the West they would have put her away. We got her out of the house. She’d been locked in for three weeks and wouldn’t come out, trying to reach God quicker than anybody else.”

Paul McCartney recalled similar events. “Prudence Farrow got an attack of the horrors, paranoia, an identity crisis and wouldn’t come out of her Butlins chalet. We all got a little bit worried about her, so we went up there and knocked, ‘Hi, Prudence. We all love you. You’re wonderful!’ But nobody could persuade her out,” he said.

Farrow herself, who had come to the Maharishi after a bad experience with LSD and who still practices transcendental meditation to this day, recalled things slightly differently. Over the years, she has insisted that she wasn’t going insane—she really was just extremely focused on meditation.

“I 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’d be flying into my room,” she recalled. “They were all serious about what they were doing, but they just weren’t as fanatical as me.”

“She’s Leaving Home”

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.

“We’d seen a story in the newspaper about a young girl who’d 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,” McCartney recalled.

Coe ran away from home at age 17. Pregnant and afraid of how her parents would react, she left with a man she’d 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.

Strangely, though, Coe and McCartney had actually previously crossed paths in real life years prior when McCartney judged a contest 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.

“Sexy Sadie”

Yet another song that came out of the Beatles’ time in India was “Sexy Sadie.” The song originated from John Lennon’s 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.

“I 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,” Lennon said. “…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.’”

Different Beatles have shared different stories about what actually happened at the ashram. George Harrison denied the rumors entirely. “Someone started the nasty rumor about Maharishi, a rumor that swept the media for years…This whole piece of bullsh*t was invented,” he wrote in the book Beatles Anthology. “It’s probably even in the history books that Maharishi ‘tried to attack Mia Farrow’—but 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.” Paul McCartney, meanwhile, said that Lennon had seen the Maharishi making advances on a woman who looked like Mia Farrow, but hadn’t seen any evidence of assault.

The band’s 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. Farrow herself has never publicly accused the Maharishi of assault, and there are many different accounts of what actually happened at the ashram.

Regardless, the band left the ashram on non-ideal terms. However, what happened, or did not happen, there was immortalized by “Sexy Sadie” forever, and their journey to India undoubtedly helped bring Eastern spirituality into the mainstream in the West.

“Eleanor Rigby”

The song “Eleanor Rigby” tells the story of a lonely, isolated woman. It was actually partly inspired by a woman who Paul McCartney used to visit when he was a youth, during a time when he would often do odd jobs for neighbors. He wound up taking a liking to the woman he would later name “Eleanor Rigby” in song, and would often volunteer to do her shopping for her. 

“I found out that she lived on her own, so I’d go around there to just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy,” McCartney wrote in The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. However, he didn’t just do it out of pity—apparently, he loved hearing her stories. “So I would visit, and just hearing her stories enriched my soul and influenced the songs I would later write,” he continued.

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