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Julian Lennon


Carl

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Just posted this interview with Julian Lennon:

http://www.songfacts.com/blog/interviews/julian_lennon/

Greg loves the "Who are your favorite songwriters" question, but the answers tend to be the same: The Beatles and Bob Dylan. For Julian, I thought it would be a perfect question, and it produced an interesting answer:

I would have to say Paul Buchanan is one of my all time favorites, from The Blue Nile. I love Steely Dan, of course, always have. Love the Led Zep boys. Beatles, of course, no question about that. I mean, the list goes on. There's too much great stuff out there.

Yes, even Julian Lennon cites The Beatles as a songwriting influence. He did so as an observer, however, not an insider.

Greg did a great job with this - he covered the songs and songwriting whereas I would have been tempted to mush it up by revisiting the absent father angle, which I find fascinating. John Lennon is a genius, of course, but his priority was The Beatles, not his first son. You can make a pretty good case that this was the right play, that the world needed his music more than Julian needed a dad.

This story plays out for ordinary men all the time: is your priority fatherhood or your passion? Wisened, older dads typically put more energy into their children, and that's what John Lennon did when he had Sean in 1975. This version of Lennon made family his priority and integrated it into his work, using Sean as inspiration for the song "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)." But he never went back to pick up the pieces with his first son.

Julian turned out just fine, in part because his middle-class upbringing kept him grounded, an essential trait for a songwriter. He got the genetic gifts, including the voice and the creative strand, and being a Lennon wasn't always a bad thing (fun fact: he dated Brooke Shields). Still, you don't really recover from a dad you can't count on. There's a weird sense of abandonment when your father is out there doing stuff for other people while you are out of sight and mind. Julian had the most acute case of this syndrome, since his father was lavishing his love in the most conspicuous way, and legions loved him back.

John Lennon made some sacrifices for his art, and one of those was Julian.

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