I know that there are times where someone with depression can be cured without medication, but for Julia it was different. I think it was art that kept her going throughout those tough years, as well as writing out her feelings on paper over and over again. Her future's looking bright with acceptance to The Cleveland Institute of Art for fall of 2010. These days, she goes to her therapists once every few months, and she's usually got a smile on her face and she's great at making jokes and getting everyone in a good mood. 3 times they wanted to hospitalize her, and each time she found a way to convince them otherwise. When she was 14, her friend saw the cuts on her arms and told an adult, and soon Julia was going to therapy once a week and takes several different medicines for her depression. Scars cover her arms and legs, and I have to pretend not to notice. Now she's had 17 broken bones and only 5 were an accident. There have been several times where she considered killing herself. Starting when she was 9, she began to hurt herself, whether it meant breaking her arm or leg, bashing her head against a wall, or taking a blade to her skin. She's not even 18, but she's already messed her life up in more ways than most adults have. But “Julia” is a “song of love,” and, regardless of where that love was directed precisely, nobody did those kinds of songs better than this man and this group.This song made me cry 'cause it had me thinking about the Julia I know. About two years later, with The Beatles in his rearview mirror, he recorded “Mother,” a harrowing excavation of his deep-seated feelings of abandonment concerning his parents. What you do hear is the combination of mantra-like calm and profound yearning he conjures each time he sings his mother’s name. Lennon’s contention that he intermingled the memories of his mother with his then-current emotions for his wife Yoko is hard to hear in the finished product. The bulk of the lyric consists of poetic imagery that speaks of beauty and distance: “Silent cloud” “Morning moon” “Her hair of floating sky.” He borrowed some of the lines from the poem “Sand And Foam” by Kahlil Gibran, including the opening couplet: “Half of what I say is meaningless / But I say it just to reach you.” It must have been strange for fans to hear the leader of the biggest band in the world co-opting a line that evokes ineffectuality, but Lennon was always about upending expectations. There is an undeniable loneliness evident in his voice, even amidst the double-tracking that Lennon preferred. Using a finger-picking style he learned from Donovan while in India, Lennon plays delicate arpeggios around his fragile yet somehow soothing vocal melody. Lennon is the only Beatle to perform on the track, solo efforts having become commonplace within the Fab Four around this time. In his 1980 interview with Playboy magazine, Lennon explained that the trip to India provided ample opportunity for songwriting, and “Julia” was a byproduct of that. But by the time The White Album rolled around in 1968, all subjects were game, as Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote oodles of material (with George Harrison and, on one song, Ringo Starr also contributing), so much so that a double-album was deemed necessary to contain it all. The Beatles rarely referenced their personal lives, at least directly, in song in their early years. The two got closer in Lennon’s teenage years, but that ended abruptly in 1958 when Julia, while crossing a street, was hit by a car and killed. In actuality, the man John Lennon was writing the song as an indirect tribute to his deceased mother Julia, which makes this one of the more oddly fascinating entries into this subgenre of music.įor those who don’t know the backstory, Lennon’s mother was only a sporadic part of his life once his father left the family when John was an infant. Or at least that’s how it sounds removed from any context. “Julia,” by The Beatles, falls somewhere in between, a kind of impressionistic meditation by an earthbound man on the ethereal presence of a woman calling to him yet hovering out of his reach.
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