Lyrically Speaking: The Beatles conspiracy at the heart of Phoebe Bridgers song ‘Revolution 0’
There is no denying that Phoebe Bridgers sits in a powerful and vital musical lineage that runs from herself, her Boygenius bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, and back through a history of idols and legends like Joni Mitchell and Carole King. Bridgers carries the torch for confessional songwriters refusing to shy away from their own feelings – but she isn’t just going to hand you her life on a platter.
Her lyricism weaves a delicate world of metaphors and imagery both as a way to help her find the right words and protect what she’s really trying to say. The intricate balance is held in devastating harmony on ‘Revolution 0’ as Bridgers leans on conspiracy for her confession.
Bridgers rarely lets her fans go beyond her lyrics. While her songs cut her open and leave her blood, guts and deepest thoughts on the table, her life is guarded, private and never shared in plain terms. When it came to Boygenius’ storming debut album, the inspirations behind the tracks were often an open secret, pieced together by small vignettes of stories or tiny snapshots fans got of the band’s inner lives. They shared that ‘We’re In Love’ is deeply and specifically about their friendship but provided no explanation for its images. ‘Leonard Cohen’ was about a bonding drive, while ‘Letter to An Old Poet’ picked up where ‘Me and My Dog’ left off, returning to its melody with no further clues on its origin.
With all these songs, fans could be detectives if they wanted to. The beauty of confessional songwriting is that it allows artists and fans to engage on a deeper level but solely through art, slowly building up a muddled map of their inner world with each release. Slowly painting in the cracks of the liminal spaces of our connected lives.
When it comes to ‘Revolution 0’, Bridgers was suitably tight-lipped. The song, to her, is about “falling in love online”. But the meaning of the title lets the world in even deeper, revealing the song to be sharper than the bittersweet lyrics seem on the surface.
‘Revolution 0’ is a name given to the ‘Paul is dead’ theory. It kicked off in 1966 as some Beatles fans accused the band of covering up the apparent death of Paul McCartney and replacing him with a songwriting double. Some take it even further to suggest that John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were so disgruntled that they’d planted clues about it in their tracks. Hearing the phrase “turn me on, dead man” in ‘Revolution 9’ or “I buried Paul” in ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ added fuel to the conspiratorial fire.
It’s only with this knowledge that ‘Revolution 0’ becomes a more tender beast. It’s not just about “falling in love online”; it’s the story of Phoebe Bridgers and Paul Mescal.
“Imaginary friend, you live up in my head,” Bridgers sings in a tender line about long-distance love through a phone screen. It captures those early days in the modern age when a person in your life is no more than pixels on a screen but a main character in your mind. “With the attention span of being in lockdown, it was just really beautiful,” Bridgers added on the experience of love in lockdown when she and Mescal first interacted via Twitter.
But more importantly than being a revelatory song about a celebrity couple, ‘Revolution 0’ may be Bridgers’ most intricate and introspective love song. Throughout the track, she uses links tot he ‘Paul Is Dead’ theory to ponder on a perhaps already dead relationship. At one point, she breaks her verse pattern to add an additional line, singing, “You wanted a song / So it’s gonna be a short one / Wish I wasn’t so tired, but I’m tired.” This could be a simple remark on depression as the track grapples with her own capacity to give and receive love, but it also connects again to the title.
John Lennon’s song ‘I’m So Tired’ is another one used for the theory, with some claiming he says “Paul is dead, man, miss him, miss him” at the end. It is also a song about Lennon suffering from insomnia as he misses his lover, Yoko Ono, during their long-distance love affair. Working on two levels, the clever liner at once connects with the lingering feeling that this relationship is dead on arrival by using the theory while also still clinging to the more romantic admissions.
She sets this conflict up early. “If it isn’t love / Then what the fuck is it? / I guess just let me pretend,” she sings. It’s a simple request and desire to allow herself a moment to play the part or enjoy the illusion of love. Just as fans theorised that the Beatles ignored the grief and loss, in ‘Revolution 0’, Phoebe Bridgers does the same, littering the track with clues and confessions like her own conspiracy waiting to be unravelled.
