"Wheel": A Most Positive 'Negative' Love Song

Today at JMMA we're starting something called our "Song of the Day." Each Wednesday we will choose one John Mayer song to talk about from whatever perspective we'd like: lyrically, musically, personally. The first song we've chosen is "Wheel."

Here are some of my thoughts on the song. I wrote this for the JMMA Yahoo Group back in March of 2005.

Wheel - A Most Positive 'Negative' Love Song
by Rob

"Wheel" is another example of why I love John's lyrics. It's like "Clarity" where he knows what he SHOULD be doing (enjoying moments as they happen instead of worry about the longevity of it all) but that doesn't mean it's easy to do.

To me, "Wheel" is the rationalization of why love goes away: IT'S SUPPOSED TO. Love is one of the few businesses that we can fail at 99% of the time and still be successful if the 1% is the right one.

People have the right to fly
And will when it gets compromised

I love this. He's talking about the "Fortress Around Your Heart" that Sting sings about... how we built walls to protect ourselves. For some of us, as soon as we feel things are getting too serious
(our "right to fly" getting compromised), our hearts say "move along" and our minds agree. Let's move it along." So we do, but someone is always left behind.

The next stanza is like something from a Paul Simon song where we've got the setting and the characters. A couple is saying goodbye at the airport. But it's more than this. Someone's LAST goodbye is blending in with someone's sigh. It's easy to know which is which. The one "going home" is saying goodbye, holding a single rose given to him/her by the other. The other is the one "sighing," the one whose heart is breaking. Because when you think about it,
an "amicable breakup" is an oxymoron. Anytime you hear that a breakup is amicable, someone is trying to save face. Someone is almost always crushed.

But that's the way it is, John tells us. That's the way the wheel spins. He's not going to be the last person to love her, and she wasn't the first to love him. It's all very impermanent. And
here's part of the problem:

You can't build a house of leaves
And live like it's an evergreen

Those are my favorite two lines from "Wheel." If someone asked me to summarize "Tracing" in two lines, I'd repeat those lines from "Wheel." "Tracing" is merely an expansion of this thought. How many times do we rush into a relationship because we want it to work SO BAD, but we haven't laid the right foundation first? We try to convince ourselves that because we both love Mocha Almond Fudge ice cream and "Joan of Arcadia," we're meant to be together forever. What we need to remember is "there is a reason strong moves slow." But again, we are just following the natural course of love:

It's just a season thing
It's just this thing the seasons do

The seasons change every year, and love changes too. We shouldn't be surprised by it.

You can find me
If you ever want again
I'll be around the bend
I'll be around the bend
I'll be around

It's appropriate that John is "around the bend" because the song takes a complete U-turn at this point. So far John's led us into a dark tunnel where love never lasts and love dying is as predictable as the seasons changing. Then he shows us the light (albeit a flickering one) at the end of the tunnel:

And if you never stop when you wave goodbye
You just might find if you give it time
You will wave hello again
You just might wave hello again

This is me reading into nothing, I suppose. But when a relationship ends and someone is hurt, there's that period where you just reflect on things. Everything slows down because it has to. And maybe if we learn to take the "slow and steady" mentality and apply it to love, it may grow back in the same place where it was uprooted before. Maybe. John DOES say "might" twice in that stanza, hence the "flickering light" at the tunnel's end.

You can't love too much one part of it

The thing to do is not get too caught up in any one cycle of the wheel because it's GOING to run its course... many times. We're going to love and lose, then someone else is going to love us more, but we may have to let them go. It's as simple as directions on a shampoo bottle:

Love. Lose. Repeat.

And then comes the most positive message of the song:

I believe that my life's gonna see
The love I give returned to me

This is the last cycle of the "Wheel." This is where the fortunate deboard the circle and hope never to ride it again.