On ‘Let Me Roll It’
Whenever I listen to Paul McCartney and Wings’ Let Me Roll It (1973) I am struck by the chorus.
I can’t tell you how I feel.
My heart is like a wheel;
Let me roll it, let me roll it to you.
I cannot get past this strange metaphor, ‘My heart is like a wheel.’ There are so many heart similes available to songwriters – why ‘wheel’? What does the ‘rolling’ motion do? And why does this analogy follow its own refusal, ‘I can’t tell you how I feel’? To me, these lyrics betray an anxious, nervously hopeful view of love and communication.
Searching ‘Let me roll it my heart is like a wheel lyrics meaning’ on Google, however, would lead you down a very different path. Various online explanations of McCartney’s lyrics focus on the titular line, thanks to a famous interview in which McCartney said the song is ‘more about rolling a joint’. To be fair, you can imagine McCartney writing the lyrics: ‘My heart is like a joint spliff wheel; Let me roll it for to you.’ Since then, music journalists have taken McCartney’s explanation of the ‘rolling wheel’ metaphor as a cheeky double entendre very seriously – and not much else has been said about it.
This is a typical trajectory of popular music’s reception. It transpires that a song with potential for complex meaning is ‘actually’ about something silly (usually the artist themselves reveals hidden references to drugs and/or sex), and as a result all ambiguity and diversity of interpretation is sucked into a black hole. In his book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), William Empson argues that ambiguity – the overlap of meanings in the use of a word – enriches, rather than confuses, poetry. To Empson, ambiguity occurs when ‘alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading.’ His philosophy is important because it allows us to disrupt dominant interpretations of works of art. It’s especially important for thinking about popular art because it can be an antidote to the anti-intellectualism and intentional fallacy committed when we take what artists say about their work more seriously than we do the work itself.
Let us take the lyrics seriously and consider the alternative interpretations.
1. Taking a chance on love
The bizarre metaphor does remind me of two much more commonplace analogies: rolling dice, and the wheel of fortune, both of which suggest risk-taking and a lack of agency in one’s fate. The Rota Fortunae, ancient symbol of the goddess of fate’s volatility, is invoked by the image of the wheel, although displaced by the word ‘roll’ (one would more commonly ‘turn’ the wheel and ‘roll’ dice). Neither of these interpretations can quite be completed, but I do think the sentiment is there in the song. McCartney wishes for luck in love – ‘let me roll it' and see what happens.
2. Setting love into motion
That first interpretation finds its limitation in the syntax of McCartney’s sentence – after he says, ‘let me roll it’, he completes the supplication, ‘let me roll it to you’. So, the wheel is rolling in the direction of the subject. If we imagine here that the ‘wheel’ of McCartney’s heart is not attached to a vehicle, and McCartney is setting it into motion towards the subject, the act of rolling becomes a precarious task. Wheels work best when attached to something, or driven by someone, that can direct the trajectory of the wheel towards its destination and guarantee that it will not topple. When McCartney offers to ‘roll’ his heart towards the subject, he trusts that the terrain on which he rolls it will be smooth, and that his aim will take the wheel in the right direction. McCartney can only offer to set it into motion by ‘rolling’ it forward, believing in chance to take on the rest. The rolling gesture suggests there is a risk in demonstrating affection; a risk the singer nevertheless wants to attempt.
3. Love is an uphill battle
We learn earlier on in the song that the subject has given him ‘something I understand … loving in the palm of my hand.’ By contrast, for McCartney, expressing love is not so easy: ‘I can’t tell you how I feel’, he confesses in the first line of the chorus. By offering to ‘roll’ his heart towards his subject instead, he is saying that he is willing to try to ‘tell’, or express, his love, through performing a laborious task that he knows he ‘can’t’ complete. If we imagine here that McCartney is rolling his heart uphill – pushing it upwards rather than letting it roll freely downwards – the song takes on a Sisyphean edge. Sisyphus, punished for cheating death by being eternally tasked with rolling a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down again once it reached the top, is invoked here whether McCartney meant to or not. With this image in mind, we can read McCartney’s line differently: he says, ‘I cannot tell you how I feel, but I will try anyway; let me roll it to you for the sake of trying.’
Not only can these ‘alternative views’ of McCartney’s lyrics be ‘taken without sheer misreading’ (they all have evidence in the text), but they must be taken together to comprehend the richness of the song. The chorus is ambiguous on purpose because Let Me Roll It is a gesture of approximation both to McCartney’s subject and to meaning. McCartney takes a chance in attempting to express his love – whether through rolling the wheel of fortune, the hopeless effort of rolling uphill, or the exhilarating risk of setting a wheel into autonomous motion – through this ambiguous word. In this way, McCartney’s lyrics are not only an attempt at articulation, but an expression of the difficulty of articulation itself.
